Conceptual artist Cole Sternberg stands atop a shelf to add layers to his mixed-media painting, 'has the ideal of eternal youth been transferred to the forest?'
This Artist Explores Humanity’s Relationship With The Environment
Cole Sternberg.
Cole Sternberg’s creative breakthrough happened with a literal splash—clinging to the railing of a commercial shipping vessel and dragging a freshly finished painting through the churning Pacific. This was back in 2015 and, when his painting emerged, he found that the waves had morphed his brushwork into something tantalizingly new. “The result was like being underwater, looking up at fractured sunlight,” Sternberg recalls. “It didn’t appear like that at all, going in, so it felt like a miracle.”
That discovery enriched his career-long exploration of humanity’s complicated relationship with the environment. The Earth became the co-creator of his works, which span paintings, sculptures, photography, film, writing and installations. Sternberg exposes his abstract paintings and photographs to the elements, at times pulling them through oceans and lakes, hanging them in California live oaks or burying them in snow so that wind, water and sunlight may etch on their patterns. At other times, he’ll fuse rocks together or wrap them in porcelain, letting their weathered forms guide the final look. For one installation, he replicated a sapling in bronze and planted it in a West Hollywood public park to comment on nature’s strength and fragility amid humanity’s presence.
Nature surrounds Sternberg’s home studio on his Santa Ynez Valley family farm, where a menagerie of animals and mountain views form the scenery of his daily life. Here, he anticipates how the elements will affect a final piece. For his paintings on unprimed linen, he layers sturdier acrylics with more mercurial watercolors. When exposed to the wind and weather, the latter tends to separate and fade, revealing new hues beneath. As this erosion process occurs, kinetic gestures emerge that may recall the motifs of bark or snakeskin, a sense of undulating ocean waves or sand dunes, or even the expansion of galaxies. “I’m strategic about how paint is applied and how the works are exposed outside, though I only know 70% of what will happen,” explains the artist. “The environment is still the ultimate composer.” Underscoring this creative dialogue with the elements is a hope that humanity’s relationship with and imprint on our world can evolve. “For me, it’s about how we recognize our presence and nature’s higher compositional abilities,” says the artist. “Because we can never really make anything as beautiful as nature.”
PHOTOS: CHRISTINA GANDOLFO
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