It’s tempting to say that Blaise Rosenthal has moved from his professional snowboarding career to being an artist, but it is more accurate to say that Blaise, who has been drawing since childhood, is merely now devoting his creative energies to his paintings.
How would you describe your work?
I would say it’s more environmental. My experiences of a certain place during a certain period, and the physicality of that place, it’s very archetypal for me. It’s like, “This is water. This is Earth. This is heat. This is foliage.”
It’s very much like it’s like my own personal Garden of Eden, except not necessarily so serene. It has more adversity than obviously a paradise would have, but it still is my own kind of primal experience, and so in that way, I relate back to that. Then the physicality, all of my work has a certain physicality to it.
There’s a real earthy or elemental aspect to your work.
Right. Charcoal is a totally natural material. It’s also one of the first mark-making media that humanity ever probably used—probably charcoal from the fire, boom—on the ground, or on the wall, or on a rock, or whatever.
Is that something that you intentionally did, or is that just a byproduct?
I use the charcoal because it was something I was doing a long time ago, and I realized there was another way I was using it. A lot of what I do is that I do something, and I go, “Ooh, that works. Why does it work?” And then I reverse-engineer it. “Why does the geometry work for me? Why does the repetition work for me?” and so it’s like that.
Your earlier work was very colorful. What was the transition to the current work?
I was making the underpainting for one of the paintings I was working on. I had just finished a show, and I was starting to work again. I made this piece, and I had all of the underpainting done, and made an outline for what I wanted to do, and when I finished doing that, I saw it, and I was like, “What am I doing? This is what I want to make.”
I had been creating these underpaintings, and then looking at it and going, “That’s really beautiful, but it doesn’t fit the idea I have.” I would complete an idea in a painting to express some concept that I didn’t even necessarily believe in five minutes later. I was trying to have all this conceptual importance in the work, or have some theoretical underpinning to the paintings. But then, I gave in to beauty, and I was like, “Why am I going to cover something that I like up?”
Do you think with that earlier work, then, you were trying to almost prove yourself in a way?
I wanted an excuse for the paintings. I wanted to be like, “OK, I’m making the paintings because I need to investigate the meaning of life or whatever.” I kept trying to think about it, and it was a very weak topic. There was nothing else. I see people make paintings about all kinds of things. It seems like a really inefficient medium for that purpose, whereas a documentary or podcast, whatever, you can get a point across.
With painting, I think it’s touching on something that isn’t necessarily explainable. To have a concept before you even start to make the painting, and then adhere to that concept, then it’s the painting to potentiate that concept. Fortunately, I stopped working and paid attention. That has been foundation of everything I’ve made since.
You’ve said you want your paintings to be about nothing, or something like that?
I don’t want them to be about nothing at all. I actually want them to be everything all at once, but I just don’t want them to be too specifically something, because that limits their potential to be everything else.
Is that because you want the viewer to bring in more of their own emotion or a feeling, and their thoughts to it, than a “story” you are trying to tell?
I would like it to be holistically experiential in the sense that when you see my art, people want to touch it. With my larger pieces, people really respond to the texture of them. To touch them on that sensory level: I want it to stimulate your mind. I just don’t necessarily want to dictate to you what to think, because I think people’s life experiences are so subjective, and the potential is then infinite.
What I try to do is to create a moment of sincerity in regards to my painting, where this painting comes as close to a hundred percent being from a place that I feel is true, and that I have a license to speak from, as far as my experience growing up, my influences in art making. Then I put it there, and people bring whatever they have to the table, and they look at it, and whatever it does for them, I don’t know.
As much as I’m trying to maybe downplay the whole idea of dictating, I at least do think there are universal themes or potentials for human experience. And if I can touch on those, then I’m doing really well. There’s a final kind of singular moment at which the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Not to focus on your snowboarding life, but are there any similarities in the sense of having a career in snowboarding, and then having a career in painting? What would you say is the connection, what’s the commonality?
Snowboarding was something that worked for me because it was an extension of skateboarding, and skateboarding was something that worked for me because it was physical, and yet it also had the potential for expression.
It was performance art, in a way, and it was also satisfying in so many ways. Skateboarding is a pretty highly refined—almost to a fault at times—but a highly refined subculture, where the possibility for meaning through artistic expression is totally inherent in the act.
What color shoelaces you have can be a way of expressing an aspect of personal identity, and I would say that snowboarding is an extension in the same way. The way in which you would do something, the way in which you wouldn’t do something, there were decisions that I made that were definitely calculations not based on athleticism, but based on expressiveness or identity.
In that way, snowboarding and painting are related, because they’re both places where I can be the person that I am. I just seem to be the type of person that has this need to do this thing and share it with other people.
It’s not a song if it was never sung, right?
Right. I’m not just entertaining myself. I am, but I’m entertaining myself with a deep-seated hope that someone else is going to be affected by what I’m doing, too, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise, so I love the idea that I am autonomous sometimes, and my work could be autonomously beautiful, but it still needs to be seen.
Instagram: blaiserosenthal
