Q&A with Eddie Martinez

How often do you draw, and what role does drawing play within your broader artistic practice?

Drawing is really the foundation for my practice, where everything starts. I draw all the time—every day. I carry pens and paper with me wherever I go. Drawing is how I think. It’s like a visual diary, a way of processing what’s happening around me. These drawings aren’t just sketches for painting, they’re their own thing. They accumulate, they surround me in the studio, and over time they naturally bleed into the paintings. Certain forms and gestures keep reappearing, but it’s never planned.

What can drawings express that painting, text, or sculpture cannot?

Drawing is immediate. There’s nothing in between the thought and the mark. Painting has a lot of physical and emotional weight— scale, surface, time —but drawing captures something more fleeting. It can hold uncertainty, speed, hesitation. Text explains, and sculpture occupies space, but drawing records the impulse itself, before it gets shaped or resolved. That rawness is something I don’t want to lose.

How do you think about the physical aspect of drawing, especially within our increasingly digital culture?

 For me, drawing is very physical. It’s about the hand moving, the pressure of the pen, the way a line shakes or slips. There’s a bodily rhythm to it. I’m interested in that friction—the resistance between the tool and the surface. In a digital world, drawing keeps me grounded in the act of making. The mistakes, the accidents, the irregularities—that’s where the energy is. It reminds you that a body is involved.

Asger Jorn wrote that “every line drawn freely is a protest against control.” In your own practice, what forms of control—artistic, social, or internal—are you resisting when you draw?

When I draw, I don’t want to clean things up or make them behave. It’s about letting the work stay loose and personal. It’s just the body responding, without filtering it through taste, judgment, or outside pressure.

Henri Matisse spoke of approaching art with the eyes of a child—discovering rather than depicting. How has your relationship with drawing evolved over time, and how do you channel that instinctive sense of discovery now?

That sense of discovery has always been central for me. When I was younger, drawing was completely instinctive—no plan, no self-consciousness. Over time, instead of losing that, I’ve tried to protect it. My studio is filled with drawings, and I’m always responding to them, rediscovering things I forgot that I made.

Eddie Martinez is currently a part of Gardeners, a group exhibition with Asger Jorn, Robert Nava, Misaki Kawai, Joe Bradley, Eddie Martinez and Tal R
Eighteen | January 23 – March 7, 2026

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