We recently connected with Benjamin LaDieu and have shared our conversation below.

Benjamin, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

This question is one I ponder about. I look back on my mindset at a younger age and all that it entailed with how I was back then. I think that even if I had tried to start a career as an artist, most likely it would have been a complete disaster because I did not have the motivation and maturity to follow through and develop my creative process to the full potential, particularly because of some personal issues I had. I might never had tried again. Even though it is hard to start something at my age and succeed, I think I have more wisdom, knowledge, motivation and maturity to make it happen now as opposed to then.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an artist hailing from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

My formative early years were full of artistic endeavors, from drawing monsters and sci-fi related things, and then later on taking art and drawing classes. My senior year of high school was spent heavily focusing on art classes to build up my resume for art school which ended up with me enrolling at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland graduating with a BFA in General Fine Arts. It was in college that my artwork really started to excel, especially with my senior thesis drawing project, focusing on urban landscapes.

After college I admittedly did not do much art and kind of just worked non art related jobs well into my 40s. It was not until I lost my job 3 years ago that I had to really do some soul searching and try to really make a go of making art as a career. It’s time.

Over the years while doing art, I have always seem to gravitate back to drawing and more specifically, pen and ink drawing. As I have refined my skills with the pen over the years doing posters for music event promotion, I have gotten decent with the pen and ink medium and proceeded to do a few series of works based on roots, trees and landscapes more recently.

I started drawing roots about 6 years ago, specifically, upturned tree roots, with a view from underneath. I always thought this view of a tree looked monstrous to me, with some roots downright looking like octopus or creatures. I drew quite a few of these where I think I hit my stride in making these roots start to come alive beyond just the root itself.

Later on, I started to draw actual standing trees, with the twist in that the tree had to have some fantastical element to it. I didn’t just want to draw any old tree. The tree had to give me some sort of presence with life beyond just a tree, while the tree had to have a significant character, one that fits my aesthetic. My pieces Itollynyth, Dafyllion, and Tomer and Asofel are good examples of this. Each of these are tree portraits but the trees look almost like something else when you look closer. A monster, an octopus, a frog.

This led to my largest and most ambitious work, Winter Tubs in the Forest, which was a 12 x 32″ pen and ink winter landscape of a mountain stream which I had displayed at Art of the State 2023, Pennsylvania’s annual state show at the Pennsylvania State Museum.

Then for the rest of 2023, I worked on my Path series. These are 6 pen and ink drawings with 4 x 12″ dimensions using a vertical landscape, but the catch is that they are all shots taken from my hiking trips.

The goal with my work is to give the viewer a story while feeling the my raw emotions that I pour onto the paper. I want you to feel the atmosphere and vibe. Art to me is as much about feeling as it is seeing.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

When I think about my body of work as a whole throughout my life, I do not exactly know that I ever really had a set goal in mind for a good majority of what I was doing. Each piece tended to just be one offs of whatever particular subject had peaked my interest at that time. In college up until my senior year, I still feel I was just experimenting around with things, seeing what worked and what did not. Some of my peers definitely had a laser focus and style almost immediately. I was not one of those for sure. When I did my senior thesis, I think I did manage to produce a coherent body of work that definitely had a continuous theme throughout, though once I left college, I sort of just stopped pursuing art as my life got in the way. Over 20 years later, once I finally decided I need to make a real go of this, with encouragement from my father specifically, I decided I have to be more mature and thoughtful about what I am doing as an artist.

My main opponent in all of this is my restless nature and my tendency to just not plan things out at all. I get bored easily and tend to jump around from one thing to the next, which in art can really be a detriment to success because there has to be some cohesion with your work as a whole. When I began thinking about this specifically, planned out what I need to do, well naturally this has helped with cohesion and continuity!

I have stuck with my pen and ink landscapes for a couple of years and I feel I have achieved a moderately successful run with it. Of course, as with all things Ben LaDieu, I felt myself growing restless yet again. Sure people loved what I was doing, but I was starting to get fed up with the constricting nature of pen and ink landscapes. Being that my work is so heavily detail focused, I would get bogged down so tightly into parts of my work that I would start to lose focus on the big picture and many times I ended up ruining a piece of work because of it. With my Path series for instance, I threw away 4 different drawings from mistakes I felt I could not fix. My contrast would be off or I would just “fill in the page” not leaving enough white space or some other error. With pen and ink you cannot erase so what is done is done. This does not bode well for someone that messes up a lot. As a result of the frustration I have been going through, I have decided a change of pace is needed. Something that can satisfy not only my detail oriented style but also the need for change. Being so tightly regimented I feel just does not work as well for me as I had hoped it would. Plus, I am itching to go back to my fantasy, monsters and dream worlds and to do something really exciting for me yet also something that gets people talking.

This leads to what I have planned for next. I want to absolutely go wild into my fantasy dream worlds and imagery. Not just with pen and ink, though I will include that within these works. I plan to do a mixed media sculpture series with lots of found objects, while layering and incorporating my drawing and also painting throughout the sculpture. I think introducing painting, which I have not done much of at all since college will be a huge new avenue of expression that I am very excited to bring to the table.

I feel that I can form a coherent series from this, even if the found objects might be completely different from each other for each one I complete. It will be the way I incorporate them together mixed with my style and unique drawing and painting elements that will make these pieces stand apart from what is out there in the art world of today.

I’m hoping this series scratches all the itches I have in my restless mind and will keep me focused on the task at hand, while being happy and excited about my art for years to come.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I am fascinated by world building, and how I can translate the worlds I want to build into my art. I read books and comics, play video games, watch TV and movies all with rich world building narratives. While making art, I imagine what I am looking at and creating is within a narrative to that story somewhere in my head. My Path series for instance does have a world building aspect to it. I gave each of my drawings a unique name. This name has a fantasy element to it that helps ground it within the magical worlds on my work. The lines I create on the page show the audience something, maybe not with words but by the expression of my strokes on the paper, the style and mood I project within the composition.

If the reader can gain anything by looking at my work, I want them to feel it as well as see it. A feeling is not always achieved in a tangible way, especially by looking at something, so if I can achieved that with my audience, the work will live on in their minds with an emotional response when they think of the piece.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.benladieuart.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benladieuart/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/benladieuart
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsvpmv-5iRAtsIhY1iyCOdA

Image Credits
1- Promo shot – Tsurdya’s Winter 2- Promo shot – Winter Tub’s in the Forest 3- Itollynyth 4- Mytholl of the Wood 5- Sun of Tsurdya 6- Thornhidledel 7- You Have To Be Kidding 8- The God of Toma