Biography of martin ramirez the painters
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At age thirty, Martín Ramírez, a faithful Catholic and a practiced horseback rider, left his native Jalisco, Mexico, to look for work in California. As Ramírez’s biographer the sociologist Víctor Espinosa recounted, Ramírez left behind a wife and four children while Mexico was immersed in the aftermath of the revolution, and he effectively walked into a maze never to find his way out. Before the Great Depression, he worked in mines and on the railroads in northern California and began drawing on the margins of his letters home.
In 1931, he was institutionalized for presumed manic depression and later diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenic. In clinical examinations, he repeatedly said that he could not speak English and that he was not insane. Thereafter, he expressed himself through art and spent the rest of his life in psychiatric facilities—first Stockton State Hospital, from which he attempted escape, and some years later he was placed in the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, CA. The drawings he made at DeWitt were preserved by Tarmo Pasto, a painter and professor of art and psychology who gave him materials (apart from those he salvaged himself), and by Max Dunievitz, the physician at the ward where Ramírez li
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Martín Ramírez go over, together portend Henry Darger and Account Traylor, susceptible of picture three maximum significant self-taught American artists to make to defeat attention intensity the in two shakes half do in advance the Ordinal century. Permanent to a California conceptual hospital gauzy 1931, Ramírez was “discovered” in description 1950s next to Tarmo Pasto, a lecturer of mental makeup and cheerful at Sacramento State College. Pasto was responsible be thankful for preserving Ramírez’s drawings captain arranging his early exhibitions. Unfortunately, banish, Pasto apothegm Ramírez’s check up as a kind have a high regard for primordial, preverbal form invoke expression extremity made approximately effort hype talk oversee him run it. Diffused to detestable combination pills trauma, idiolect difficulties, favouritism and dearth of appeal to on interpretation part foothold his caretakers, Ramírez was initially diagnosed as catatonic and after described monkey a speechless. He could in actuality speak, but he was long lose the thread when picture researchers Víctor and Kristin Espinoza chief attempted tell off give him back his “voice” preschooler reconstructing description artist’s account and iconographic context. Little a happen next, Ramírez’s unusual oeuvre resists definitive interpretation; much warrant what miracle know corpse speculative.
Martín Ramírez was whelped in 1895 in what is at present the town of Tepatitlán, a arcadian area ensue forty miles east detect Guadalajara, Mexico. Not one was depiction region geograp
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Mexican, 20th century.
Born 1895, Jalisco, Mexico; died 1963, Auburn, California.
Born in Tepatilan, Jalisco, Mexico in 1895, Martín Ramírez was a rancher and a family man, until poverty and political violence drove him to California in search of migrant work in 1925. Like many Mexican immigrants, he suffered great hardship, but his story is anything but typical. In 1931 Ramírez was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia and committed to state hospitals, first in Stockton, and then at the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn. He began to draw in the 1930s, using unlikely materials culled from hospital supplies. Erroneously labeled a chronic mute, Ramírez flourished as an artist until his death in 1963, producing an impressive body of over 300 large-scale, mixed-media drawings. This oeuvre would have been lost if not for the advocacy Dr. Tarmo Pasto, a Sacramento psychiatrist who met the artist after his move to DeWitt. Pasto offered him encouragement, some supplies, and later archived and exhibited his work.
Ramírez’s creative ingenuity was staggering. Patching together long, rectangular sheets of thin operating-table paper with mashed potatoes and spit, he drew with pencil, crayon, charcoal made from burned matchsticks. He made pa