Born in Mexico, Martin Ramirez worked on a farm and cared for his family until poverty and political violence forced him to move to California at the age of thirty. Six years after arriving in the United States, he was hospitalized for catatonic schizophrenia. He began drawing in the 1930s using unlikely materials from hospital supplies. A victim of a misdiagnosis regarding the chronic nature of his catatonia, Ramirez produced an impressive body of work—over 300 large-format drawings using mixed media—until his death in 1963. These works would likely have been lost had Dr. Pasto not met him. Pasto preserved and exhibited the artist's work after providing him with encouragement and supplies.

Ramirez's creative ingenuity is astounding. He drew with colored pencils, graphite pencils, and matchsticks on long sheets of very thin paper used to cover operating tables, which he held together with mashed potatoes and saliva. He prepared pigments by chewing colored newspaper, which he then spat into a bowl of cooled porridge. His isolated figures and landscapes are often placed within a dramatic scene: Mexican horsemen reminiscent of the artist's youth, majestic Madonnas, trains disappearing into tunnels, animals, a solitary figure lost in thought who could be a self-portrait. His most complex works are superimpositions of images cut from magazines or newspapers.