Today we’d like to introduce you to Sean Gerberich.
Can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today. You can include as little or as much detail as you’d like.
Art has been the backbone to my existence for as long as I can remember. It began innocently in school with doodling as I’m sure it has for many. It was not until my sophomore year of college that I challenged myself to fill an entire page with ink. Once I completed this I felt a satisfaction I had never experienced before. It was like that of the sensation had when placing down the last piece of a puzzle and seeing everything fully come together, a vision in its plenitude. At this time, I was interning at my college radio station where I had a show each week. I would play music I love and share what about the songs and the artists who wrote them I thought to be special. I made playlists containing the songs respective to each show and had the idea to draw something new to make as their covers. I shared the playlists and the companionate art on my Instagram which was the first step I took toward realizing my art publicly. I did so casually and just for fun as it was something that just felt nice!
Unfortunately, due to covid…, the station was discontinued and I no longer had the same outlet for sharing my art. Around the same time, I went to see FKA Twigs in Oakland with one of my best friends and after the show returned to my car to see two shattered windows and both of our backpacks stolen. My backpack had the folder containing all the artwork I had ever made up until that point. This hit me hard and I initially felt weighed down with discouragement. However, after a few days my feelings toward the unfortunate event began to change. Instead of feeling heavy and low, I turned it into a catalyst for a newfound motivation to replace what had been stolen and make even more art to outweigh all that I lost. It was this moment that I would say truly defined my first embrace of being an artist. I don’t believe I’d have come into contact with such a drive were art not something truly integral to my being. After that, it was like night and day.
I started spending more time on each piece than ever before. I started developing my own style and experimenting with new methods. I kept sharing my work on Instagram, using each piece as a metaphor for an idea that I felt was valuable to entertain in parallel with the ink. I am always trying to stimulate, not in any exact or particular way, but as ever it’s made possible, that alone makes me feel as if I’ve done my job. Over time, people started to ask me if I sell my work and for a long period I said no as I was intimidated by the idea. To this day I still have difficulty navigating the relationship between money and my art/creativity. For too long I couldn’t see making money off my art as anything but a contaminant of the creative process. So I put it off. Eventually however, I graduated college and money started to be more and more pressing of a factor in my life. It was the summer of 2021, that I decided to make prints of my ink works and sell them. I did this 3 times with different pieces each time, and for the first two, I fortunately sold every single print I made. Then, however, on the third, and in my opinion, best print run, I managed only to sell one. This was quite discouraging and led me to call it quits on prints as a whole and just focus, like I had from the start, on the development of my vision, style, and the art itself.
Fast forward to later that year, I began working for a real estate brokerage in San Francisco, living at home in the East Bay, and commuting over an hour both ways every week. There, I was lucky enough to catch the eye of an agent I worked with who showed great interest and asked me to create a website so they could share my work with some artists and designers to whom they were connected. Nothing concrete came of this referring experience, however, in the abstract, it gave me a sense of validation and legitimacy that I had never felt before. I had a thought like “wow, someone looks at me and sees an artist before anything else”, and that felt like lightning. So, I took it and ran. Ever since, I have felt an ever-growing fire of desire to realize my vision as an artist and share my work with the world.
Fast forward to the summer of 2022. I find myself moving to Los Angeles to start a new role with the same real estate brokerage and live on my own for the first time at 22 years old. It was at this moment that I really kickstarted the growth of my practice. I began to paint, first with spray paint, then onto acrylics. I started with smaller canvases not much bigger than a piece of paper. Over time, I scaled up my practice and now my largest piece to date is a commissioned piece for my amazingly supportive parents. It is a 62 x 62-inch acrylic work on wood. It felt amazing to make, especially because I got to do it entirely at home with my whole family being able to watch the process unfold over many weeks of the winter holiday. At the end of 2022 I was sadly laid off due to my brokerage going under and came to be in a state of unemployment and disarray in one sense, but highly motivated in another.
I am 23 now and live as an artist with the money I have saved up from my time in real estate. I am developing the path I want to take into selling my art and preparing an exhibition. I am defining what I want art to be for me and how I want to move forward with it. I am so excited to be here in LA where there is so much love and passion for art. It has me fired up to keep sharing my work and watch it find its way onto the walls of many houses, home to individuals with a love for the abstract.
Has it been a smooth road? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has not been smooth and any true road is eternal. I see no end to it. Therefore, I see no alteration coming to the variability of its dynamic, emotional texture. For it is in the artist’s nature to see not consistency, but change in the path they follow. I hope for there to be many more bumps, detours, and moments necessary to pull over and refuel than I can predict. I want to take care of how my progress unfolds as an artist and develop that as naturally as possible. I get excited and feel warmth from the eyes of others, but I also get down and feel cold as a result. Both are just as much a part of the process as they are essential to what it means to be human. I embrace the polarities and strive to maintain honesty in my endeavor to reflect life’s chaos in the order of my work. One big struggle I experienced in particular was being asked to commission work by someone, completing two pieces, and having them say they don’t want to pay for them because of the changing market. It was really hard for me to digest because I didn’t understand why they would ask me in the first place. However, I decided to take it as a gift. I would rather have my own work then leave it with someone who doesn’t value it.
We’d love to learn more about your work. What do you do, what do you specialize in, what are you known for, etc. What are you most proud of? What sets you apart from others?
I happily and honestly admit that I cannot create work reflecting reality as the photographic, realist artist can. That practice is bewilderingly impressive, but it is simply not who I am, nor a direction in which my soul is drawn. It is hard to define my work because it is so purely abstract. Especially today, the world of abstract art is so dense that typifying it as abstract is an almost null descriptor. Instead, I like to characterize my art by way of the intention I hold toward how it will be experienced by others.
I hope to make art that slows people down, that lets them catch up to themselves through the jolt of its intensity. I like to invert meaning like that, slowed down by something that feels fast, held still by something that feels like its plummeting. Intense, bold, and striking, yet precise, pretty, intricate, and perplexing are qualities that predominate what I create.
I studied Psychology and Philosophy in school, so tendrils of the two lick the intention and direction of my work. I love to accentuate the natural mechanisms of vision by messing with depth perception, subtleties of the dynamic between foreground and back, and the way we sense spatial dimensionality in general. This is all to grip the perception of the viewer in a fashion that brings out a motion in the work, and therefore a stillness in them. I am often told that my pieces feel like they are moving, or that they are “real”, which always makes me laugh because they are not moving, but they are real in the sense that they’re physical. The fact that people will state something untrue about the piece, like it having movement despite it being a still, inanimate object, and something true, that fact of its being real object, despite that truth’s obviousness in the face of its inert materiality, leave my spirit high and jumping.
I specialize in highly detailed black pen on paper and spray paint and acrylic canvas works. Before getting into paint, all of my work was primarily done in black and white. It was not until I met with paint that color and I started to really get along. Color is now quite a central aspect of my practice, although to it I still feel so immaturely acquainted. It is something I am developing a taste for and I am eager to keep growing my proficiency in using. However, there is a deep place in my heart for the simplicity and sheer strength of the potential black and white have when in parallel with one another. I am a student of the philosophy of doing more with less, which I believe to be the ultimate constraint an artist can subject themselves to because of the wild positives that can come from it. Despite color shining a wealth of novelty onto my creative process, I will be forever indebted to the trust black and white have ingrained behind my eyes.
I am known also for accompanying my work with poetry that I write myself. I use it as a linguistic parallel to the artwork. Words serve to anthropomorphize the primordial character of imagery and its being so prone to hold fast in mind. I believe words and imagery, when woven, create a fabric both powerful and tender. My poetic style is just as abstract as my work and I love that. I write in this manner because I try very hard to leave my audience in a state of uncertainty, wonder, and curiosity at even the simplest of things, like reading at a phrase and then staring back up at the art on your third hands bright little screen. I think those three qualities of experience are most deeply tied to what it means to be a child. Art is the portal our inner child cannot help but gravitate toward. It is then through abstraction that I attempt to lead the viewer on an ascent, to a place high and far enough away from reality, that they can experience the fullness of a return to who they are most intimately. I find the further you can be drawn away from what you think you know and what you deem to be the case about anything, the more power you find waiting within you upon making it back home, once you return to the feeling you know so well, the foundational structure of all memory. Your self!
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I would say that I am a risk taker. I put my heart into my work and my poetry and am deeply passionate about doing justice to my own creative process. Without doing so I will never see the glint of who I can be that I not yet am. With that being said, there is a vulnerability to my engagement both with the art itself as well as those who take interest in it. If I do not invest my character with all the hues honesty holds, how can I expect anything I do to be felt as honest or true? I find risk to be one of the most effective mechanisms of growth. I see risk often defined by negative outcomes resulting from doing one thing versus another, or going about something in a known way versus one that has no proof of success elsewhere. That is all well and good, however, I think risk is better defined, not by anything positive or negative, but by the relationship you have with yourself. In my eyes, a risky act or doing something risky has to do with whether or not you have the courage to identify with that act or thing as a part of you or your life. We are so afraid of risk not because of mere failure or pain, but because we would have to take ourselves to be the person that failed or the person that experienced pain. Both of these rip us from the comfort of our resting identification of self where we are so sure of who we are and what we are capable of. Therefore, risk is a step into defining yourself anew, into stripping away the past and embracing the future as a new limb. Risk is how we come into contact with the truth of our potential and the being of our deepest nature. Risk is revelatory. It is by way of risk that who you wish to be best becomes.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sometimewith.me/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanrobert.g/?hl=en
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-gerberich/
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/srgerberich
