Life and Work with Maxwell Roath

Today we’d like to introduce you to Maxwell Roath.

Hi Maxwell, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
It’s been a bit of a wild ride. I was born in Colorado and am the fifth generation of my family being raised in the state. I was always into making art, when I was young I drew a lot of video game characters and when I got to high school and was applying for colleges it was an obvious choice to apply to art schools. I ended up going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago having never been to the city before and was a bit shell-shocked when I arrived. As a naive kid from Denver, I was very unaware of how conceptual and bizarre the contemporary art world was, which was hard to digest at the time. I ended up finishing school with a BFA in drawing and printmaking and moved to Boulder to live with one of my best friends while figuring out what to do with a fine art degree. I fell into an apprenticeship at a tattoo shop which at the time had a lot of promise, but the people I was working under were not great people and it ended up being three years of building tattoo machines for not that great of pay. After a couple of years, I quit and followed a girl to New York. I was feeling a bit lost at this point, and through a set of circumstances ended up at the Art Students League of New York. It was here that I started taking all the technical classes that I felt I had missed out on from my undergrad and fell back in love with printmaking.

After a year of classes, I moved back to Denver to readjust and apply to grad school and decided to attended the New York Academy of Art. I felt I had unfinished business in New York and it was an incredible opportunity to grow and see artists at the top of the field living and working. At the end of my second year in grad school, the pandemic hit. At the time, I was making large woodcuts that I was unable to continue in a small apartment in Brooklyn. The summer was all over the place and we ended up graduating months later. When the dust had settled, I didn’t feel that New York was going to be the same for a long time and I was wanting to get back out to the West. I ended up moving to Santa Fe and spent the rest of the year painting and drawing at the Ryder Studio. Tony and Celeste are absolutely incredible artists and it was a great place to solidify the technical training I had gained and continued to build from grad school. While I was at the Ryder Studio, I became good friends with the second-year at the Tamarind Institute and she convinced me to apply to the program. Last year I moved to Albuquerque and finished the Printers Training Program. It’s an intense time, you are printing lithographs 70-80 hours a week for months but it was an awesome opportunity and an incredible learning experience. Now after so many years of academic training I finally moved back to Denver. Finally, having gained the education I have wanted, I am looking forward to making work and establishing my art business and practice.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No, it has not been a smooth ride, I mean every journey has hardships. I thought I was going to be a tattooer and that would be my life but it was three years of just a lot of frustration and feeling unsupported by the people I worked with. When I quit, I just couldn’t see it working out and I felt like a fraud. So it’s been a long journey of trying to gain the education and skills that I felt I had missed out on. Art careers are so arbitrary. There is no linear path and the journey was difficult without any role models to point me in the right direction. I mainly felt like I was stumbling in the dark for a long time trying to see what would be necessary to continue to do what I have wanted to for so long. All of it’s been hard. The big factor as well is that the whole business side of art is something art schools don’t teach. So I have had to slowly build a puzzle with no pieces from all these different programs and friends who have been kind enough to give some sort of advice. There have been a lot of moments of doubt. Am I doing the right thing? Am I good enough? All leading to very humbling moments. I always feel that I am not working hard enough. I always need to be doing more. However, I finally feel like I have all the tools, I just need to make it happen but none of that didn’t come without struggle or frustration.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a bit of a jack of all trades. I love to paint, draw, and make prints. I would say I am best known for more of my comical pieces. I did a large series of inappropriate conversations between inanimate objects which I loved but as my work has evolved I have tried to pivot that into some more serious concepts. These almost representational surrealist pieces like the “Fruit Bird” series that has some darker commentary on our food but visually is complex is a direction that I am looking forward to exploring more. I am most proud of the big woodcuts I was making for my monolith series. They were an interesting progression in my art-making and felt like a strong step towards a concept that I had wanted to work on for years but didn’t feel I had the skills to properly articulate what I wanted to make. It felt good to have gotten to a point where my skills felt good enough to do the concept justice. I believe what sets me apart is that I expand a lot of genres and media. I am diverse in that way and with a unique sense of humor and wit to my work that I hope resonates with others.

How do you define success?
Success for me is to support myself and make work that I am continually proud of. I want to push myself as far as I can and I hope that means all of that which come with success as an art career. I want solo shows, more features in magazines, people to continue to buy and support my work, but on a much more basic level, success would be owning a home so I can have all the wonderful friends I have met over the years be able to come visit me.

Contact Info:

• Website: maxwellroath.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maxwellroath/?hl=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8yzyQU37-z5lW9xq8tsjfw/feature