We recently connected with Max Geller and have shared our conversation below.

Max, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I spent this past November conceiving, designing, and executing a mural at a biological reserve in Colombia called Reserva El Jaguar del Carrizal. I first arrived there in October, eager to learn and help serve their mission of reforestation in any way I could. The caretakers of the place, a warm couple and their ebullient, full-of-life 3-year-old son, gave me ample opportunity to do so.

My first month there was taken up with all manner of tasks around the forest. After getting in a day’s work in the morning, we’d spend our afternoons talking, playing music, and making art. Our mutual interest in all things creative really helped to bring us closer to one another that first month, and they knew I was always keen for an art project. As it happened, they had a wall that needed filling, and so one day they asked me if I would like to paint it.

It was my first time ever working on a scale as large as that, and it presented so many challenges which afforded me some real moments of wonder when I finally would figure something out. Making things more interesting was the fact that this was all happening in the middle of a jungle on the side of a mountain, and tools and materials were sparse at times. And making it more joyful was the fact that I painted this mural while having earnest conversations with members of the family and fellow volunteers, while listening to the mirthful screams of the family’s son as he ran around playing with dogs and twigs and getting up to any form of harmless mischief, while smelling the aromas of home-cooked meals, while listening to Cumbia music blasting through the speaker, while looking out at the verdant mountains of the Sierra Nevada, the place that the Indigenous of the region call “the heart of the world”.

Having spent a few months there, I certainly understand why they’ve given it this name. Everything in those forests feels so alive, every square millimeter teeming with life. Insects flitting, birds flying, trees arching and curving, flowers blooming, snakes darting, water rushing, and everywhere lurking the phantom presence of the jaguar, almost never seen, but always felt in the air, moving through the forest like moonlight through a nighttime cloud.

Over there, everywhere you go, and everything you do, every thought you have is filtered through this breathtaking biological menagerie. Needless to say, I was enamored, and so it was the natural choice to honor such stunning wild beauty with my mural. But, given the sheer abundance and diversity of the flora and fauna of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, I knew that cramming all that life-energy into one painting would require a surface of biblical proportions. I simply didn’t have the space, resources, or time to complete a task as monumental as this. So, I came to a painfully pragmatic conclusion: I had to choose one animal from this manifold, mystical, mesmerizing circus on which to shine my proverbial spotlight. But which one?

I was stumped. But, as luck would have it, one day the answer fell into my lap. In an effort to orient myself amongst this dizzying surplus of options, I began consulting a particularly useful book made available to me at the reserve. It was an almanac of sorts, a catalogue of the different forms of life native to the Sierra Nevada region. I was flipping through this book one afternoon with the couple’s son looking over my shoulder. Given his innate enthusiasm, he was oohing and ahhing all over the shop, yelping with joy each time I turned the page. That is, until I flipped through to reveal a marvelous insect. Bright green with red stripes, clownish polka-dots punctuating its body, poisonous barbs perforating its back. A fat, sumptuous, brash and boisterous caterpillar. At this image, the boy went silent. The effect was markedly different from the images we had seen before. A spell of awe seemed to have enveloped him, rendering him speechless. As I looked at his slack-jawed little face, I realized. This was the one. The headlining act, the showstopper, the shining star, the subject of my proverbial spotlight.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My name is Max. I was born and raised in the suburbs of New York City. I’m an only child who grew up in the woods, and so naturally I spent lots of time as a young kid just trying to keep myself busy and entertained. I climbed rocks, walked amongst the trees, rode my bike, looked at birds, collected sticks and rocks. And when I was worn out from running around outside, I would come inside and draw pictures. I watched my dad draw pictures, too. I looked at his old drawings piled up in the backroom and stuffed in drawers in his studio. I wanted to be like him. From the age of about 2, I started filling sketchbooks. Creating characters, monsters, vehicles, machines. Little worlds. The grandiose visions of a small fry.

I didn’t have many friends as a kid, but I was never wanting for them. I learned early on how to wrap myself up, and that’s how I stayed through my adolescence. While most of my classmates headed out to house parties and football games on the weekend, I was amongst loose papers and pens, still in my house, still in the woods. Pencil shavings in my hair, side of my hand blackened with charcoal, dull pain in my head from excessive concentration. Bleary reflection of myself in nighttime windows. Music playing while I lay transfixed on the kitchen floor.

At that time, discovery didn’t come from the outside. It wasn’t colliding with me in the liquid rhythms and fickle tides of a teenage social scene, nor did it come from the staccato shouts of the drop-outs who still hung around the school cafeteria because god knows they couldn’t go home, those nihilists hiding under hoodies and turned-down hats whom I secretly admired. No, for me, at that time, it came from my tools. It came from wheedled-down Prismacolors and ink splotches and stray dabs of paint. Discovery found me in my solitude. It kept me company.

Since then, a lot’s changed. I’m done with school. I’ve left my house, left the woods where I grew up. I’ve been traveling around South and Central America for about 7 months now. After spending so much of my life inside my own head, I figured it was time to see what’s out there, time to see about this other way of discovering. I’ve met lots of people, had lots of experiences I couldn’t have imagined having. I’ve learned about new ways to express my creativity that have taken me utterly by surprise. I’ve painted murals, helped build houses, made music with strangers and friends alike, learned how to do tattoos, learned recipes, learned songs, dances, rituals, customs. Now, discovery is coming at me from a different place. It’s coming at me constantly from all sides.

Lately I’ve mostly been testing things out. I’m trying to figure out where I fit. How to work out where these new parts of me fit in relation to the old ones. I’ve encountered a lot of creative people while traveling, and some of them have become partners of sorts. We make stuff together. We tattoo each other. We are working to figure out how we can use our skills to scrape together some money along the way.

Beyond this, I’m really not sure what my future holds, and its a great feeling. Right now, I’m just following my interests, seeing what’s possible, marveling at the idea of how much is possible. I’m excited to see how things keep changing, excited to see the next shape things take.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

When I first started college, I got sucked into the fairly competitive culture there. I spent too much of my first couple years in school vying for the approval of my professors. Now, I look back on the pieces I made during that time and can understand how they may be a display of some technical skill, but a lot of them feel more like exercises than pieces. Which, I guess, in a lot of ways they were. But whatever they were intended to be, I know that they were unfulfilling to make, and this to me is an utter refutation of the whole point of it all. Of course, sometimes, in order to achieve something significant, you have to do shit you don’t want to do. But, in those instances the hope is that those chores are steps towards accomplishing something that really resonates with you. Because otherwise, you’ll find yourself just trudging along, exhausted, but not really sure what you exhausted yourself for. This is how the first couple years of school felt for me. I was killing myself for an end that was ultimately misguided. Later on, I started to give myself more lee-way, started to loosen up, started to be a little less embarrassed about the kind of work that came to me intuitively, about the kind of work that filled my private sketchbooks. Instead of trying to posture as the kind of artist I thought the academic structure wanted me to be, I started (gradually) relaxing into a less inhibited form of expression. And, to my pleasant surprise, the overwhelming response from my professors was positive. As it turns out, lots of professors (and people in general, whether they be friends, enemies, colleagues, or all of the above) are waiting for this to happen, waiting for them to stop being so scared. And the more positive responses I got, the more I was able to let loose and really start expressing myself. And that’s all I strive for now: to express myself with the same freedom that I had as a little kid. To just explore and get excited.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Maybe it’s because it’s relatively new to me, but most recently I’ve been feeling really rewarded by more collaborative forms of art-making. For instance, before I started traveling, I began working with one of my best friends on a narrative drawing project. This is the first project that involves creating a little world that’s not completely my own. Instead, it’s a little world that we get to share, and that aspect of sharing makes it even more real and more exciting. Even more fun and fullfilling is the fact that most of our ideas come kind of clean out of thin air—it’s not like we sit down and spend grueling hours waiting anxiously for concepts to come. When we talk, the ideas flow freely. It’s lovely to see what comes up and be surprised by ourselves. I find a similar form of satisfaction in giving and receiving tattoos. My favorite way to do it is not to have a real plan, to just kind of feel things out together on the spot. Then it’s like a little project we get to work on together, a little adventure, a sometimes-small but always-real form of connection.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://maxgellerart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefrizzypaintbrush/
• Other: instagram page for CHEAP-ASS DESIGN, a new project started by me and a few friends: https://www.instagram.com/cheap_ass_design/