Artist Series 2025: Brooke Einbender
Telluride artist Brooke Einbender’s brain is so abuzz with ideas that simply talking to her is like participating in one of her interactive art experiences.
Particularly like the one she calls “Gaiascope,” which features suspended illuminated kaleidoscopes big enough for viewers to stick their heads into. The conversation goes from the parallels of skiing and painting to surrendering herself to something greater in her art to the energetic force in her work that makes viewers feel like they’re taking a journey to a different dimension.
Brooke Einbender in the sun.
Take one look at Einbender’s new graphics, available on Wagner skis now, and you’ll get a sense of what we mean—her kaleidoscopic, color-saturated, geometric designs seem to come alive and shape-shift the more you look at them. “My two passions are skiing and art,” Einbender said, “and it’s been a dream of mine to make skis with my art on it.”
Einbender got her start as an oil painter, but she’s expanded to become an installation artist who uses technology like virtual reality to create immersive experiences. She’s the recipient of more grants than we can list here, she’s been featured in numerous publications including Forbes and the Miami Herald, and she has a TEDx talk on YouTube.
Sundae Slopes by Brooke Einbender
We connected with Einbender recently from her home in Telluride, where she’s lived for 7 years, to ask her more about her process and how she created our newest graphics. Here’s what she had to say.
Wagner: Your work is featured all over the country—Miami, Scottsdale, Washington, D.C. Where are from originally, and why did you make Telluride your home?
Einbender: I grew up in the Bay Area, then moved to Santa Fe, and then went to college in North Carolina. I got a presidential scholarship for visual arts and attended Wake Forest University, and that’s where I studied oil painting. I was ready to take the leap and be a full time artist, but I moved to New York City, where I helped manage a private art collection. It was a whole art historical education where I learned every facet of art world. I didn’t make my own art that year, but I did discover VR painting. Then I had the calling to dive back into my own art. My dad was out here in Telluride, so I flew out and got a studio here. Moving to Telluride, I felt like everyone is within arms’ reach, and the more you give back to the community, it comes back to you tenfold. I got grants, studio space, and a solo exhibition. And you never know who you’re going to meet on a chairlift—I’ve done a lot of business on a chairlift.
Wagner: Are you a lifelong skier, or did you pick it up in Telluride?
Einbender: I learned at a young age when my family went to Sun Valley, Idaho, and did it when living in Santa Fe in elementary school. Then I lost touch with it, and when I moved to Telluride in 2017, I didn’t know what my ski level was. That year we had record-breaking snowfall, and this mountain makes you good if you show up. And I actually moved with my brother, who’s an epic skier, and I had to keep up with him. And that helped me go out of my comfort zone. I feel a lot of similarities and parallels between skiing and painting. Carving lines down a mountain in fresh pow feels like a paintbrush to me. I tap into a flow state when skiing, which is something I tap into when I'm immersed in my oil paintings, too. And there’s an element of surrender—surrendering yourself to something greater and letting it move through you. When you’re on the mountain, you’re also surrendering to something greater.
Cosmic Candy by Brooke Einbender
Wagner: What is your artistic process like?
Einbender: I like to say my painting process is called the “unknown zone.” It’s how I create art and live life—I never have any idea of what the end result is going to look like. It’s all about listening to my intuition and letting the journey to where it wants to go. It takes me to beautiful destinations I could never dream of. A blank canvas is like infinite possibilities. It’s an iterative process of order and chaos, and a common thread in my work is color. My pieces have a vibratory level to them; they have their own energetic force that makes you feel something.
Wagner: Tell me about VR painting. What does that mean?
Einbender: I thought of my paintings as worlds I wanted to jump into, so I got a grant from Telluride Art to get a VR headset. I began translating 2D oil paintings into immersive experiences, and I could paint in digital ink as though I were painting sculpture. My first exhibition at a gallery in Telluride featured augmented reality and oil paintings where people could scan my oil paintings and it would superimpose the twin I made onto the painting.
Glacial Gumdrop by Brooke Einbender.
Wagner: That sounds so cool.
Einbender: It was so cool. But two weeks after my show opened, it closed because of COVID. I was devastated. So I went back to the drawing board and began contemplating the isolation everyone was in on a global scale. I began collecting reclaimed doors from my community, and I began painting, woodcutting, and embellishing them to turn them into kaleidoscopic portals. I got a grant to install 10 of them along the walking trail into the plaza of Mountain Village. It’s a beautiful, meditative walking experience.
Wagner: How does it feel to have your art on topsheets for Wagner?
Einbender: It’s a dream! I hope I can get a pair of these because I know it will open a lot of doors. And I want to see about creating art experiences around them, like pop ups in Jackson, Aspen, and Telluride to showcase them and also make it an experience. I want to use projection mapping, which is immersive and experiential.
Honeycomb Haze by Brooke Einbender.
Wagner: Keep us posted on that! Any final thoughts in the meantime?
Einbender: You can dream big, but you have to leave room for magic.
You can see Einbender’s work on her website, mindbender-art.com, or her Instagram, @mindbender.art.
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Article by Kimberly Beekman
Kimberly Beekman is the former editor-in-chief of the late, great Skiing Magazine (RIP), and a longtime editor of SKI Magazine before that. She currently uses the title of “freelancer” as a beard to ski powder all over the world. She lives in Steamboat, Colorado, with her wonderful daughter and terrible cat.
