Snowboarder-artist Ben Poechman ventures into uncharted terrain. Words :: Feet Banks
“My oldest brother was a very talented sketch artist,” Ben Poechman says. “He could pencil sketch in perfect detail. I compared myself to him, thought I sucked and couldn’t do it, and never put the effort in.”
Thankfully, he had snowboarding. But, as one of six kids raised on a farm in rural Ontario, even that was not an easy path. “The nearest ski hill was an hour away—Beaver Valley—but it was private,” says Poechman (pronounced peck-men). “Talisman was also there, but it was closed. So I would just build my own terrain parks in the cow pasture that had a tiny five-degree slope by the barn.
I’d pile bales of hay and put old chicken feeder troughs onto plywood to make rails. I’d drive a tractor out after school and leave the lights on and shred my own little park by tractor light. My cousin had a snowmobile, so on weekends we could do tow-ins. Snowboarding was very solitary for me until I was in high school.”
With a crew to have fun with, Poechman became a very talented street and park rider. In his senior year (2009), he won a DIY video contest that landed him at the Camp of Champions summer shred camp on Blackcomb. That fueled a full-time move west, or almost full-time.
“For the first few years out here, I’d work landscaping for the off-season, then go back to Ontario for most of the winter to film street segments. My first full winter in Whistler I rode the park every day. I was that guy in a hoodie hiking the park on a pow day. Icy rails were all I knew.”
Back in Ontario because Whistler was having a terrible season, a filmer suddenly disappeared mid-project.
Check the award-winning short film Halation, featuring Ben Poechman:
“It was late December 2014, and my buddies and I thought we were filming another Trash League street video but no one could get ahold of the filmer, so our crew was falling apart. I had a selfie stick I’d gotten for Christmas as a gag gift and a crappy Sony point-and-shoot camera, so I just went to a closed ski hill and started filming myself, mostly just hiking in the woods and riding pow. I fell in love with powder in Ontario.”
That four-minute, produced-in-solitude movie, Selfie Stick Man, exuded the kind of passion, determination and soul that core snowboarders are drawn to, and Poechman became an underground hit with a new Instagram handle: soulboarder. His return to Whistler and transition to pow riding kickstarted a new phase of his growing snowboard career (albeit with the requisite summer job to actually make enough money to survive).
But the thing about art is that it finds a way to get out. After seven years of landscaping, Poechman was ready for a change. “It got to a point where I was up at some $20 million mansion cutting grass with a pair of scissors on my hands and knees because it had to be that perfect. I had an epiphany: I think I can do more in this world.”
He started soul searching and landed an apprentice job carving stone inukshuks for the gift shop at Fathom Stone Art Gallery, Whistler. After a year of training, gallery owner Jon Fathom offered Poechman space and tools to try his own thing. “It was a sweet deal. Jon would pay me hourly to make inukshuks and in my free time I could carve whatever I wanted and sell it on commission. And I could still snowboard every day.”
Poechman’s first piece was Chili Trees, a four-foot marble rendition of snow-covered trees based on the work of iconic painter Chili Thom, who had recently passed away. “I’d seen Chili’s work around town, and it triggered a lot of emotion in me. The way he painted, I could tell he had spent time out there in nature.”
Chili Trees sold right away, providing a boost of confidence (and cash) that helped push Poechman into more carvings and commissions—and eventually paintings. His early canvases reflected the beauty of the natural world he’d encounter out in the forests and mountains: “When I started, I was stuck in the naturalist style, painting something that looks identifiable. And that was how I valued my work. I’d ask myself, How much does this look like a tree or a mountain?”
Honing his skills (and selling work) for the next few years, Poechman was able to rely on his art as the sole income to support his expanding snowboard career. Until a knee surgery created the time and space to recalibrate and experiment.
“I already had been feeling I wanted to do something different. Getting knee surgery and spending six weeks on crutches forced me to take some time out of the studio and rethink my approach and ideology. What is art? What does it mean? I read a lot of art history and started taking inspiration from ancient cultural and primal art. Probably some of that comes from my time carving stone as that’s one of the first forms of art.”
Following his interest in less-realistic art freed Poechman to create pieces that are “more idea-based or abstract. Stuff where I can shut my brain off and paint from the subconscious, like a kid. Kid art is so sick. And kids can look at a piece and see 100 different things. I don’t always know what’s in there, but they will immediately identify with and find meaning in it.”
At the same time, Poechman says he had never felt like he could try creating more abstract work until he felt he’d firmly established his ability to make something look realistic or accurate. “I felt like I needed to be able to demonstrate that skill before I could step back from it and do more idea-based pieces.”
“…kids can look at a piece and see 100 different things. I don’t always know what’s in there, but they will immediately identify with and find meaning in it.”
The next step is to combine his two passions: art and snowboarding. Collaborating with snowboard companies has always been a dream. “I’ve been searching for something that would look good on product and I didn’t feel like my naturalist stuff was the right fit. So now I am having conversations, pitching ideas and learning the ins and outs of applying my abstract art to textile. It’s exciting to learn and to venture into uncharted terrain.”
Exploration, progression, passion. Ben Poechman hasn’t used his selfie stick in a while, but, on a snowboard or in the studio, he’s still carving out his own path.
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