The paintings of Eddie Martinez contain a grunting, primal urge for mark-making. With a slew of tools and techniques, he piles up canvases with chunky shapes and smears that appear simultaneously accidental and blithely confident. The layers of his work go deep, and a nice, long look at a Martinez image reveals an idiosyncratic history of art: cave paintings, still lifes, animation, art brut, children’s drawings, and graffiti are all stacked and spread into an undeniable slab of satisfaction. Eddie and I spoke at his studio, in front of an exhibition’s worth of new paintings.

—Ross Simonini

Ghost Fish

THE BELIEVER: This one’s great.

EDDIE MARTINEZ: Yeah, I’m happy with that one. I’m suddenly interested in trying to figure out if my drawings translate into large-scale paintings. This is starting to feel pretty drawingish to me.

BLVR: What do you mean, “drawingish”?

EM: Like the weight. It’s impossible to take a drawing and just say, I want to make a five-by-seven painting. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But for me, in my process, I haven’t figured it out yet. So that’s why I’m constantly trying to replicate it—how do you make a pen line out of that same weight of paint? How does that translate? So I’m playing with different-sized brushes and different motions. It’s starting to get there. I feel like my drawings are more successful, quicker. And they’re easier to make. It’s not about someone else looking at it and saying, “Oh, that’s like a drawing.” It’s about me looking at it and feeling it’s natural.

BLVR: You said that this is your most abstract painting.

EM: Yeah, not ever, but out of this body of work it is. I don’t know, I’m just really enamored of that painting. I feel like I’m doing some things there that I’ve been wanting to do.

BLVR: Could you say what those things are?

EM: Um, I like that collaged sun. That raw-canvas collaged sun. It’s just like raw canvas with a little bit of paint on it. It’s dusty, so it really looks collage-y to me. It has that faint charcoal line. You can see the sheen and the white. And then it’s just really flat. It just feels like the definitive collage move. It feels abstract to me.

BLVR: Are you trying to get the feel of collage with a whole painting like this?

EM: No, I’m never trying to replicate that. And I’m not trying to make it look like a drawing, either, ’cause I could just make a large-scale drawing. I could make five drawings while we’re sitting here. Doodles. And I might really like one of them a lot. And so how do I...