behind the brush with Blaine Fontana
Welcome to Behind the Brush, where we offer a peek behind the curtain through the voices of talented artists within our community. This week, we’re chatting with Blaine Fontana, a Portland-based artist who helped us recently make an impact for one of Major League Soccer’s most beloved franchises, the Portland Timbers
Many of your pieces seem to blend the line between art and design. How do you navigate the intersection of these two disciplines?
First off, let me share my deepest gratitude for extending this interview. Muros has always been a brand I’ve held in high praise and respect. The creative vision and project managing footprint this team has made around the world is incredible. I had always wanted to work with y’all. Our TIMBERS 50th anniversary activation mural was quite the baptized-in-fire experience! Through your amazing guidance and professionalism, we managed to create something really extraordinary for the community and for this revered soccer franchise. It was truly a wonderful collaborative milestone.
Great question. My ethos, passion, sanity and continually evolving style isn’t so much about navigating this intersection, rather it has always been about approaching it with a holistic embrace. As a multidisciplinary creative, primarily doing murals’s, fine art, design and sculpture, art and design are not detached from each other, they complement each other and are strengthened by their opposing soulmate. The principal of Wabisabi comes to mind, which is generally how my home is designed, how I cook and how I live. It’s so much part of my personality and upbringing. Embracing alternative genres through creative problem solving is second nature to me. Embracing this approach helps me find inspiration, narrative, and visual solutions from unlikely places.
How do your local surroundings and environment influence your creative output? Being in the Pacific Northwest, we can imagine inspiration isn’t too hard to come by, but how do you pull in the things you see and experience and reflect it into your artwork?
Greatly. I believe any creative filters are products of upbringing, consciously or subconsciously. It’s impossible not to. For me, specifically growing up in a forest on Bainbridge Island along with Portland in my later teens, then in LA for 10 years and finally moving back to the Northwest nearly 20 years ago, undoubtedly steers my vision. As I mentioned previously, I am a child of dichotomy, the result of two positive polarizing family values and history, a child of the forest and of the streets. My inspiration greatly comes from juxtaposing these two environments. I honor nature, critters, flora, and fauna along with celebrating the edge, the grit and pop colors and design of the city, with a dash of 60’s and 70’s graphic retro beauty.
How has the local Portland community played a role in your development as an artist? What’s your take on the local art scene?
To put it bluntly, it’s been the second most transformative experience of my 21+ year career. I literally have a 5” circular logo on the back of my right calf to honor and celebrate this spiritual and creative transition.
When I moved back to Portland in 2008, it was challenging to shed this ugly competitive nature I had as a defense mechanism from LA. I quickly learned to embrace the spirited competitive community and that we’re all in this together. It’s been a beautiful ascension and evolution ever since. We all look out for each other here, share jobs and are loud supporters of each other‘s career. My passion working with wood blossomed into a path I never expected. Portland is an overwhelmingly embracing town especially with visual creatives.
It was 2013 when Matt Wagner and Gage Hamilton decided to create the Forest for the Trees Mural festival in Portland. With the guidance and endorsement of Kamea from PowWow along with city grants and massive crowd funding, they set out to choose artists that have never done murals before to see what happens. Although I hadn’t created anything large scale since my graffiti days for the public, I was thrusted into this beautiful environment, using all my traditional academic teaching, experience with fine art, design, and a rusty memory rattling cans. However, it wasn’t that first year when things changed, it was the second year of this program in 2014 when I did a mural on Alberta that busted open the gates… Since then I’ve had the honor of creating murals around the world. This is why I have a FFTT logo tattoo designed by Zach Yarrington on my back right calf.
You’ve collaborated with some massive brands and professional sports teams through the years. How do you approach collaborations, and how do you balance creating for organizations who have stark differences between their branding and creative styles?
It really is amazing when you give someone a soapbox to share their ideas, passion, and ultimately the marketing goals from a massive company that is in an awkward scenario handing over their brand to a stranger with visual guide rails. The results can be mutually rewarding. By just holding their hand, extending a little patience, you will be able to achieve far more creative autonomy, and latitude. I also believe that embracing, although sometimes very awkward ideas, can push you into creative solutions that you never had considered before. This is the essence of creative maturity, and professionalism that sets you apart from many others. Fortunately, over these many years these international companies have come to me because they humbly want my visual funk. I ask them to go through my previous pieces and select the ones that stand out so I can understand better why they selected me. This is imperative because of the wild stylistic range I proudly have achieved. Lastly, this goes back to art, design and the intersection. Whereas many see these apart from each other, I see typography, design, art, texture, narrative, process, and environment as one entire experience.
How do you stay motivated and continue to push your creative boundaries?
By embracing unorthodox projects, mediums, and media that I’ve never done before. Reminding myself every morning that I won the Willy Wonka golden ticket of being able to share my vision and creativity with the world as a full time professional artist. But above all, the humbling experience of knowing I’m leaving a creative impact in communities, individuals and contemporaries around the world. And bringing in a little bit of visual poetry, inspiration, identity, connectivity and love into the world. There’s always one more hopeful, unattainable opus of perfection.
What has been one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as an artist, and how did you overcome it?
For me, this is a massively loaded question. There are so many ways to answer this. I could discuss the three darkest moments in my career that were very difficult and the third one, recently, being the worst. These were financial challenges as a sole provider. These were moments of doubt in my identity as an artist. These were creative issues of imposter syndrome. These were devastatingly personal. I think ultimately it is important and whoever is reading this is that it’s about failing forward. It’s continually taking risks, always swing at the ball. Without failure, there’s no lessons learned and growth achieved. You will never have regrets doing it, it’s only when you don’t, you experience that emotional void of regret.
Having said this, I’m choosing to highlight the most technically challenging project that I’m on the verge of finishing this week. Six months ago I was awarded a mural gig for the new Terra Mae restaurant | Cascada Hotel development in the Alberta neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Originally this was going to be an on-site piece. However, it deserved more than just painting a 25 foot wide 8 foot tall mural on drywall. The level of excellence, detail, architecture, design, carpentry, and the significant hotel experience, spa(s) and restaurant, will have an incredible impact on Portland. It deserved more than just a sheet rock mural.
So it was my foolish idea to propose an 18 foot wide 5 foot tall canvas that I would paint in my studio. This has required me to redesign and demo parts of my studio to fit the largest canvas piece I’ve done in my career. Once completed, I will have to unstretch it, roll it up, rebuild all the stretcher bars in the restaurant, frame it and reinstall it. I can’t state enough how incredibly complicated the custom carpentry is behind this commissioned canvas. It also required three of us to pick it up safely after stretching it on my studio floor and mount it on the hand made French cleats. Despite my best efforts designing this as light as possible, it must weigh around 100 lbs and is extremely awkward in its grand scale.
Visually, it is unlike anything I’ve ever painted. Even though, I had always in my deepest, most sacred place in my soul yearned to paint a Divine Feminine, Sacred Mother piece. I always knew it was there, awaiting for the right moment. Finally, I have this incredible opportunity to honor all the powerful, talented and bright women who have greatly shaped my life and moral compass.
As a little parting tangent, I’m compelled to share with you a phrase which relates to the Terra Mae commission. I’ve heard many times over the years from colleagues, professors, instructors and mentors, that if you are able to paint or draw human hands/feet, horses or roses, you can render anything. I chuckle at this because in the last four weeks, I rendered an enormous Gypsy Barn horse and a rhododendron (may has well been a rose), with aerosol for the first time ever and am now painting the most maddening and largest hand and arm with red, orange, and yellow acrylics (which are arguably the most transparent and difficult hues to work with). I seem to be a glutton for punishment and addicted to challenges.
How has your artistic style evolved over the years, and what key influences have shaped your current work?
My work over the years has evolved from painterly to illustrative, graphic, to symbolic, to realistic, meanwhile embracing new techniques along with unorthodox visual juxtapositions. And then I circle back all over again and again. There are so many foundational influences I’ve mentioned previously in interviews. Here are a few; my Mother & Father, my ancestors, Ralph Steadman, Hiyao Miyazaki, Julie Taymor, David Carson, Doze Green, Phil Frost, Andy Goldsworthy, Frida Kahlo, Spike Jones, Rick Rubin, Saul Bass, Charles & Ray Eames, Le Corbusier, Zaha Hadid, Stanley Kubrick, Chuck Pahluniuk, Shel Silverstein. At the moment right now though, the muralist and fine artist Max Sansing from Chicago, makes me pause with absolute child wonderment of creative possibility.
What advice would you give to emerging artists who are just starting out? Looking back, is there anything you wish you had known earlier in your artistic career?
Looking back I can’t imagine any other way I would’ve done this differently, every minute, week, month and year have been a wild, hard and rewarding self discovery, hundreds of lessons learned along with having a supportive community that includes my partner, my friends and my family. At 48 years old, I have seen so many digital self publishing transitions from Friendster, to Myspace to Facebook to blogging and the death of blogging/podcasts, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and then the rebirth of blogging and podcasts. Choose your platform(s) wisely. It’s important and crucial to adapt as all this media rapidly changes. It’s even more important to realize that “likes don’t keep the lights on”. It’s your brand. That means showing up on time, that means doing the work even though you’re having the worst day, finding mojo to make something incredible and completing it on time. How you navigate your projects and clients needs grace. Have people around you that can be constructively critical of your work and your path, this will remedy you through your doubts. “Your net worth is your network.”
Let me also mention this incredible experience that I’ve witnessed ever since I graduated with my BFA at Otis College of art & design in 2002. I printed 2000 art postcards at that time. Since then I have always printed art postcards, some 4 x 6 some 5 x 8. But what is really fascinating and interesting, is over those 20+ years, these are still effective if not more than ever. People cherish these when you give them one. You can leave them at barbecues, on people’s refrigerators, galleries, events, at cafe’s, at bars, it’s really amazing how sometimes this comes circling back to you from a random card. This is how my career started in LA. In an age where we are consumed by a screen, giving somebody a tactile piece of artwork that they can keep as a rare social transaction, is lacking these days. You never know who might see this little moment of art on a piece of card stock.
Tell us where the people can keep up with you and your work!
Instagram: @blainefontana | Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/fontanastudios | Threads:@blainefontana, or my website: https://thefontanastudios.com/
