Eileen: Younghee, I’m so excited to have the chance to chat with you about your upcoming show. Looking back at all of your work on your website, along with your latest work, it is very clear that drawing is a huge part of your practice. In a world where it feels like painting gets all the credit, you treat drawing as the main event. I’ve been deliberating on different directions I can go in asking you about your drawing practice, but I am wondering if maybe we could begin with you sharing more about your drawing practice.
Younghee: Hi Eileen, yes, I love drawing with pencil, charcoal, cray-pas, oil sticks. And I love to sketch out with a fat round brush loaded with oil paint on linen prepared with a lead-white ground. Lines can be fluid, long, thin, or short, broad, broken. I am not sure when these linear elements become patches, planes, shapes forming writhing figures in outdoor settings or anything else. It is hard to say when drawing with the medium of painting transforms into painting or remains drawing.
I consider my art process very intuitive. With an initial spark of an idea, I pursue the composition quickly over the entire picture. Then I develop it for months and at times years and let it simmer. During this process, unintended digressions can become entrenched, and there is no choice but to scrape the textured brushwork, give it a thin coat of white, usually, and restart the idea, again and again.
In the recent Orpheus work, I held onto the freshness of the initial impulse as a focus as much as the subject matter: the pastoral before the fatal snake bite, the journey to Hades, the music and art of persuasion, the backward glance, the second loss, and so on. I chose to work with a limited color palette beginning with black and white, as in Orpheus in Hades, Leading into Light, and Orpheus and Eurydice.
Younghee Choi-Martin, Leading Into Light, Oil on Linen, 24" x 28", 2024
Younghee Choi-Martin, Orpheus In Hades, Oil on Linen, 44" x 59", 2023
Younghee Choi-Martin, Orpheus and Eurydice, Oil on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2024
In Orpheus Reaching and Orpheus Crossing Rivers, I was exploring the full scale of gold and white—the golds being various yellows such as yellow ochre, Naples yellow, Indian yellow, with a hint of vermilion. Because the contrast of yellows and whites sits in the middle-to-light range on the value scale, I felt the compositions also needed darks. I chose charcoal marks as the unifying element that holds the disparate forms and marks into a cohesive whole.
Younghee Choi-Martin, Orpheus Reaching, Oil on Linen, 53" x 56", 2025
Younghee Choi-Martin, Orpheus Crossing Rivers, Oil on Linen, 53"x 56", 2025
In Last Picnic and Eurydice at Rest, I chose green and white, and even tried pink and green for the elegiac, pastoral settings. The articulated brushwork is not so gentle. This body of work might appear sketchy, fast, rough-hewn. In these paintings the sensibility is biased toward the unsettled, suggesting becoming or moving; at times outlandish gestures are contrasted with quiet passages. However, these compositions are finely orchestrated among lines and planes, verticals, horizontals, diagonals, hatching, thin and thick patches, presenting a convincing pictorial reality.
Younghee Choi-Martin, Last Picnic (green and white), Oil on Linen, 44" x 59", 2026
Younghee Choi-Martin, Eurydice at Rest (pink and green), Oil on Canvas, 48" x 72", 2026
Younghee Choi-Martin: Orpheus Recent work is on view from Nov. 3 - 28, 2026. The opening reception is Saturday, Nov. 7, from 3PM to 5PM.