Martin Ramirez is labeled an "outsider artist" because he was self-taught and seemed to be in a world totally unto himself. Of him relative to this 'outsider' description, it was written: "One reason his drawings always seemed so confounding, even to outsider-art connoisseurs, was because no one was really sure if the women, horsemen, buildings and trains that appear in them were pure products of his imagination or portrayals of specific subjects in the real world that had particular meanings for the artist. What was Ramirez trying to express?"

Marked by a reverberating and repetitive line, his drawings have an obsessive quality. Of the 300 plus extant works, the most recurring images are the horse ...