The Serapes have followed Martínez throughout his extensive career as an artist. His first few, created in the eighties, were fairly simple, with primary color progressions separated by broader areas of color, resembling serapes that one could find on the border or in tourist towns in Mexico. Every couple of years, his serapes were re-visited. “Very recently, I have returned to the series, changed my technical approach, pared the serape idea down to the essentials. I started utilizing the whole appropriately proportioned canvas or paper to create a whole painting as an object. It is probably the closest I’ve come to “pure” painting for its own sake. The new variations in dark, somber tones, painted on trapezoidal-shaped canvases, became the serape-derived “Tlacuilo Stele” series. In ancient Mesoamerica, a tlacuilo was a highly respected artisan, perhaps a worker on stone or perhaps a scribe or artist.”