Bold Journey Interview

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ben Junta. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Ben, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose? 

This is a really interesting and vital question. I was in high school and had seen a Mark Rothko painting, and quickly felt what some might call a “spiritual feeling” as I viewed this. My parents took us to a few misc museums now and again, but by no means had any understanding of art history. All I knew at that time was that this thing I was looking at seemed to hold some sort of “non verbal/non written communication”. The only other time I had felt anything similar was while out hiking in the High Sierras near Lake Tahoe in California where I grew up. But whereas I had no control over how nature presented itself, this painting was clearly a conscious effort by a human to convey something far deeper than the mere rectangles of color, for lack of a better quick description. It was not a direct link from this to immediate painting per se, but through a series of events while in college, this earlier “feeling” I had felt while looking at a Rothko painting was what I knew I had to explore as my purpose in life.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I make paintings and mixed media conceptual art. For those of your readers who may not know how the day to day formal art world generally works, it is not so usual for an artist to make paintings or art objects related to two different thought processes, and yet, after at least 15 years of adhering to the idea of solely making art which I term “narrative abstract/concept based work” related to ideas of how the American culture raises boys into men (#masculinity #toxicmasculinity #healthymenhealthyculture ), I also returned to making landscape and seascape painting, that were originally part of my early formal art study when in art school. 

So many current statistics are showing that especially in this new digital age, there is a crises amongst young men and their mental health – so many are not doing well. Having both played collegiate football, as well as early dabbling in the male model world when younger, as well as misc jobs in the interior design and art worlds, I know that I have a unique angle into the ways in which boys can feel stereotyped into ideas of what a man may or may not be. It can be confusing, for so many reasons, and I do not see any healthy initiation processes which help boys make the transition into healthy manhood. I do not attempt to provide answers in my artwork relative to this, but to merely attempt to bring up the cultural ideas and stereotypes related to this.

As for the landscape/seascape paintings, after 15-20 yrs of not being involved in this, I was sitting on my surfboard and was just in awe of my view of the meeting of land and sea, and could not deny anymore that painting this too is a love of mine. And especially in this time, we do need to be paying attention to how we are, as a people, choosing to be stewards of our lands and oceans.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?