[Greenpoint, Brooklyn]
[New York Close Up]
--Alright, I got my wallet, keys...
--Come on!
--Franny, come on!
[Eddie Martinez, Artist]
Yeah, let's go see if that graffiti is still there.
[Franny, French bull dog]
I'll show you the ear.
Someone spray painted this little ear
that I really like.
I'm aware of everything, pretty much, that happens
in the five-block radius--
on the walls! [LAUGHS]
Not anything else!
I don't want to be aware of anything else
but the mark making.
Whoa!
Endless heart...vagina.
[LAUGHS]
I did graffiti
all through high school, pretty much.
I took it most seriously when I got out of high school.
And then I stopped in my early twenties.
Oh, thank God!
This ear is still here!
Voila!
The ear!
Isn't that nice?
I just think it's pretty masterful--
as spray painted ears go. [LAUGHS]
Definitely still really obsessed with graffiti.
It's one of those things that
gets into your system and doesn't leave.
I love it.
I also love the fact that
my relationship with it now is such that
I don't actively do it.
So there's no chance of
doing jail time for it or anything.
[Eddie's studio]
But, if the thing you're drawn to happens to have risk,
then, maybe you need it.
[Eddie Martinez's Risky Business]
I mean, one thing that everyone's trying to figure out--
living in this city--
is, "How can I do what I need to do and be comfortable?"
You have your studio practice,
and then if you start exhibiting, and then...
you start selling it, and then...
"Holy shit! People are really into what I'm doing!"
And it's going well, and...
And then if you start getting flown over to Europe
to have shows...
And then if you get a bigger studio,
you have to be able to keep up
to afford the studio.
And, you know, it's just sort of like this constant thing.
If I were to have a show in New York
in the next six months,
people would expect a certain type of painting.
Like a still life of a flower bouquet.
Figures with large eyes.
Stuff like that.
And that's really something that I feel...
wholly...
committed to abandoning.
I'm not trying to, like, denounce the visual past.
It just seems impossible to me
to be able to keep making the same image
that I made six years ago.
I mean, I could do it,
but...
I would be just a bastard.
--I think this guy is officially lost!
--Battle over!
--For now, anyway.
--It needs to dry.
I'm much more interested, at this point,
in trying to figure out
how to do what I know how to do
but make it abstract.
Well, this painting feels pretty abstract to me.
It's figurative-esque,
you know?
And I feel goofy even saying this,
but that's not what someone would say,
"Oh, that's an Eddie Martinez painting."
I'm interested in trying to figure out
how it is that I go about
successfully achieving my idea of abstraction.
So, it's something I don't know how to do,
which is exciting
and terrifying at the same time.
So now, I really have to go into the paintings a little more
to figure them out--
to pull their potential out of them.
Because I don't necessarily know what the imagery is,
and I don't know what the moves are going to be
as readily as I did when
I was, like, painting a bouquet of flowers
over and over and over again.
--Fuck!
--It's like two hundred dollars worth of white paint.
[LAUGHS]
[The Journal Gallery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn]
Also, I think it's just
about getting older.
Things are getting simpler
in life for me, and so
visually it makes sense to me
that they would get simpler in the paintings--
or that they would reveal themselves
in a faster fashion
that just comes out a little quicker.
I feel like if people are genuinely invested--
not monetarily,
but genuinely invested in you as an artist
and what you're doing,
then they should be able to
keep supporting you.
And part of that support, of course,
is, you know, greenbacks.
[LAUGHS] That has to happen in order to...
for everything else to happen!