When the pandemic first shuttered Phoenix, Aileen Martinez began painting places she missed. An ongoing series was born, in which Martinez portrays buildings around town, giving them character, ebullient color and a deep sense of longing.
Her Crescent Ballroom has airy brown bricks and pastel accents, fringed by palm trees so loose the green spills from their leaf outlines, tops almost seeming to waver. Her Pizzeria Bianco stands wistfully empty under a pink sky, structural lines meandering, brushstrokes plainly visible. Her Miracle Mile arch stretches over a dark purple street, hues intense on its storefronts.
At first, Martinez painted on-site. “I would go to each spot and stay there for six or seven hours,” she says. “Part of my thinking was I wouldn’t leave the spot, either for a bathroom or water.” Now, many months in, she paints from photographs. Martinez often sets up in Phoenix coffee shop La Bohemia, where she works and sips cafe de olla as many as six days a week.
Martinez, a North Phoenix native, left town for five years to study art therapy in Tennessee. She moved back to the Valley in 2016. She begins her pieces by sketching in black marker, creating lines “kind of loosely drawn, but that still show the subject.” Then she begins to brush, making those lines brim with watercolor and gouache.
“It’s an illustration of how I see the world,” she says of her approach. “Sometimes it’s positive and bright. Sometimes it’s ugly and messy. At the end of the day, there’s always something positive to look towards.” Follow Martinez’s work and see pieces for sale on her Instagram: @look.see.draw, or email at aileenmdepop@gmail.com.
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PLATINUM BRAND
When sketching her barely wavy, imperfect lines, Martinez likes to use Japanese markers that last a long time and let her “feel the weight of the tips.”
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IPHONE
These days, Martinez usually works remotely rather than sitting on-site for hours. “I drive to the spots and take pictures from different angles,” she says. An iPhone camera does the trick.
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GANSAI TAMBI WATERCOLORS AND WINSOR & NEWTON GOUACHE PAINT
“Definitely very colorful,” is how Martinez describes her paint hues of choice.She has been moving away from watercolors to gouache, a“forgiving medium” that allows for more mattes and layering.
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ACQUERELLO WATERCOLOR PAPER
Martinez prefers a sketchpad with thick, high-quality pages. For an art school assignment back in Tennessee, she started toting a pad everywhere. “It became a habit, drawing everything I saw
