By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter
Interview, a hip American magazine, recently featured artist Eddie Martinez as one of the artists to watch in 2009. ``His idiosyncratic drawing style is deceptively simple and has the magical, faux naive quality of Paul Klee,'' the magazine wrote.
The 31-year-old artist is generating a lot of buzz in the art world for his exuberant paintings inhabited with comic book-like characters and characterized by intriguing forms.
The Korea Times met with Martinez, who was in town last week to attend the opening of his first solo exhibition in Korea at the Seomi&Tuus Gallery, Cheongdam-dong.
Born in Groton, Connecticut, Martinez said he was always interested in art. ``Even when I was playing sports, I always gravitated towards the graphics, forms and colors. I started skateboarding, there's always a huge presence of art in that with the skateboards and graphics. `The Simpsons,' when it came out, that was a huge influence on me, and comic books, Garfield, Ziggy and Calvin and Hobbes. I was just drawing and painting, doing graffiti and stuff like that,'' he said.