Standing at the foot of Little Cottonwood Canyon, you get a sense of scale that doesn’t just humble you—it crushes you. The granite walls shoot up thousands of feet, jagged and chaotic. Most artists try to capture this wildness with loose brushstrokes, trying to mimic the mess of nature. But Joseph Toney does something different. He looks at that chaotic rock face and sees a grid. He sees geometry. He sees a math problem waiting to be solved with a paintbrush.
I have spent the better part of a decade covering the intersection of outdoor culture and visual art, and usually, you find two distinct camps. You have the dirtbag climbers who sketch on napkins, and you have the agency graphic designers who click mouses in high-rise offices. Joseph Toney is the rare anomaly who exists comfortably in both worlds. He is a visual translator. He takes the raw, unpolished experience of the American West and filters it through a lens of precise, architectural beauty.
His work is inescapable if you spend any time in the mountains. You have likely clicked into a pair of Armada skis bearing his graphics, wrapped yourself in a Rumpl blanket adorned with his vectors, or driven past one of his massive murals in Salt Lake City or Denver. But the ubiquity of his work hides the complexity of the man behind it. How does a kid from the rolling, green hills of North Carolina end up defining the sharp, jagged aesthetic of the modern Rockies?
Also Read: Chantal Oster and Chris Jozeph
Key Takeaways
- The “Device Drawing” Method: Toney rejects the traditional plein air loose sketch in favor of rulers, compasses, and French curves to mathematically reconstruct nature.
- From Injury to Innovation: A devastating set of knee surgeries in his youth forced him off the slopes and into the studio, inadvertently launching his design career.
- The “Carbones” Initiative: He literally paints with the ashes of climate change, harvesting charcoal from Utah wildfires to create pigments for his fine art.
- The 60-Second Hustle: His career at Armada Skis began not with a formal interview, but with a brazen, unsolicited pitch on a trade show floor.
- Public Art as Intervention: His large-scale murals are designed to disrupt the urban commute, forcing city dwellers to acknowledge the wilderness looming just outside town.
Does a broken knee actually build a career?
It’s a strange thing to say, but the best thing that ever happened to Joseph Toney’s art career was getting hurt.
Toney didn’t grow up with the jagged peaks of the West. He was raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. It’s a different world down there—ancient, rounded mountains covered in a thick blanket of green deciduous forest. He attended Appalachian State University, a school where skipping class to catch a powder day or a swell in the river is practically a rite of passage. He was a skier first, an artist second.
But high school changed that hierarchy. He blew out his knee. Then he did it again.
I’ve had friends go through this. For an active kid, being told you can’t run, jump, or ski for a year feels like a prison sentence. You have two choices: you can sit on the couch and play video games, or you can find a new obsession. Toney chose the latter. While his friends were out filming skate videos or hitting the terrain park, he was stuck in a chair. He turned to the computer. He started messing with vector graphics, learning the pen tool in Illustrator, and obsessive sketching.
That confinement forced him to look at the mountains differently. Since he couldn’t physically experience them, he had to mentally deconstruct them. He learned to draw the lines he couldn’t ski. By the time his ligaments healed, he had developed a visual language that was entirely his own—a blend of the athlete’s knowledge of terrain and the designer’s obsession with structure.
Can you really launch a career in sixty seconds?
The art world loves to romanticize the “discovery.” We like to imagine a curator stumbling upon a dusty studio and finding a genius. In reality, especially in the commercial art world, success is about 90% audacity.
The story of how Toney landed his dream job at Armada Skis is legendary in industry circles, and it’s a masterclass for any young creative reading this.
The year was 2014. The setting was the SIA (SnowSports Industries America) trade show in Denver. Imagine a convention center the size of an aircraft carrier, filled with thousands of people, pumping bass music, and the smell of neoprene and cheap beer. It is an intimidating place. Toney was still a student. He didn’t have a badge that mattered. He didn’t have an appointment.
He wanted to work for Armada. For those not in the know, Armada isn’t just a ski company; it was the company that broke the mold. They were the punk rock response to the racing establishment. Working for them was the Holy Grail for a ski artist.
Toney walked up to their booth. He found the marketing manager. He didn’t hand over a resume. He pulled out a friend’s iPad.
“Give me sixty seconds,” he said.
He scrolled through his portfolio right there on the trade show floor. He pitched his vision. He showed them that he understood their brand better than they did. It was a gamble. Most creative directors would have told him to get lost. But the boldness worked. That minute-long interaction led to an internship, which snowballed into a full-time gig, which eventually landed him the role of Lead Graphic Designer. When you look at the clean, geometric lines of the Armada Invictus series from a few years back, you are seeing the direct result of that trade show hustle.
What is “Device Drawing” and why does it matter?
Walk into most landscape galleries in Park City or Jackson Hole, and you will see a lot of the same thing. Oil paintings, thick impasto, impressionistic colors. They are beautiful, but they often feel stuck in the 19th century.
Toney’s studio looks less like a painter’s atelier and more like an architect’s drafting table. He calls his process “Device Drawing,” and it is fascinating to watch.
He doesn’t just freehand a mountain. He builds it. He uses tools that most fine artists abandoned years ago: rulers, compasses, and French curves. If you haven’t used a French curve since high school geometry, it’s a plastic template with complex, smooth edges used to draw manual curves.
Why does this matter? Because it changes the emotional weight of the image.
When I look at a Toney painting, I don’t feel the chaotic breeze of the meadow. I feel the permanence of the geology. By using these mechanical tools to render organic shapes, he strips away the noise. He simplifies the mountain down to its essence. He calls these “memoryscapes.”
Think about your own memory. When you recall a favorite hike, you don’t remember every individual pine needle. You remember the sweep of the ridge. You remember the sharp angle of the summit. You remember the feeling of verticality. Toney’s mechanical lines capture that memory better than a photograph ever could. He offers a stylized reality that feels truer than the actual thing.
How do you turn a wildfire into a paintbrush?
This is the part of Toney’s story that hits me the hardest. It’s where he transitions from being a “cool designer” to a serious contemporary artist.
Living in the West means living with fire. We spend our summers watching the horizon for smoke. It’s a source of anxiety and grief. A few years back, after a particularly brutal fire season in the Uinta Mountains, Toney decided he couldn’t just paint pictures of the landscape anymore. He needed to paint with the landscape.
He went to the burn scars. He hiked through the blackened, silent forests where the fire had raged. He began harvesting charcoal—the literal carbon remains of the trees.
He brought this material back to Salt Lake City, ground it down into a fine powder, and mixed it with a binding medium to create paint. He titled this series “Carbones.”
The resulting works are haunting. They are monochromatic, relying on the texture and the gritty reality of the medium. When you stand in front of one of these pieces, you aren’t just looking at a representation of a mountain; you are looking at the dead body of a forest, resurrected as art. It is a profound commentary on the climate crisis. He isn’t preaching to you; he is showing you the physical cost of a warming planet, converted into something beautiful. It turns the viewer into a witness.
Why paint a wall when you can paint a canvas?
There is safety in a canvas. If you mess up, you throw it away. You paint over it. It sits in your private studio until it’s ready.
A mural is a different beast. It is public performance art. You are on a lift, thirty feet in the air, wind whipping your face, with traffic passing below. Everyone sees your mistakes.
Toney has become one of the most prolific muralists in the Rockies, and I’ve often wondered why he puts himself through the wringer of large-scale public work. Painting the “Crane Mural” in South Salt Lake wasn’t just an artistic challenge; it was a physical feat.
The mural features massive sandhill cranes, birds that migrate through the Utah corridor. The wall is huge. Toney has to treat the building like a giant vector file. He uses grids and projections to map out the design, but up close, it’s just abstract fields of color. He has to trust that the math works. He has to trust that when he steps back 50 feet, the lines will align.
He does this because he believes in the intervention. Cities like Salt Lake or Denver can feel like concrete cages. We get stuck in the commute, staring at bumpers and billboards. Toney wants to break that trance. He wants to put a 40-foot mountain range or a giant native trout right in your peripheral vision on I-15. He forces the wilderness back into the urban environment, reminding us of where we actually live.
Is the “Skintrack” the new art studio?
Authenticity is the most valuable currency in the outdoor industry. You can’t fake it. Skiers know when an artist is a “tourist.” The snow looks like cotton balls. The mountains look like ice cream cones.
Toney’s work resonates because he earns his turns. He spends his winters on the skintrack.
For the uninitiated, “skinning” is the act of putting sticky fabric strips on your skis and hiking uphill, powered only by your legs and lungs. It is slow, rhythmic, and meditative. It provides hours of silence to observe the world.
Toney calls these sessions “skintrack sketches.” He isn’t just working out; he is researching. He studies how the low winter sun hits the north face of Mount Superior. He watches how the shadows lengthen across the snowpack. He memorizes the specific geological folding of the Wasatch.
I’ve heard him talk about hiding “Easter eggs” in his paintings. He will render a specific cliff band or a notorious chute that only a local backcountry skier would recognize. It’s a secret handshake. It tells the viewer, “I was here. I climbed this. I know this line.” That shared experience creates a bond between the artist and the audience that a studio-bound painter can never replicate.
Can you be a “Serious Artist” and a commercial designer?
There is an old, tired stigma in the art world that suggests “commercial” work is selling out. If you make graphics for a product, you aren’t a “fine artist.”
Joseph Toney proves that this distinction is garbage.
His background in graphic design is exactly what makes his fine art so powerful. Design teaches you hierarchy. It teaches you composition. It teaches you how to guide the viewer’s eye through complex information. When Toney approaches a canvas, he uses the same principles he used when laying out a ski topsheet. He balances negative space like a typographer. He uses color theory with the precision of a brand director.
He operates on what I like to call the “Robin Hood” model of creative survival. He takes on the big commercial contracts—the tech office murals, the branded collaborations with companies like Teton Gravity Research—and he uses that income to fund his deep, personal explorations like the “Carbones” series.
He doesn’t slap his name on everything. He is selective. He works with Protect Our Winters (POW). He works with brands that actually care about the places he paints. He has found a way to make the commercial work feed the soul of the fine art, rather than draining it.
What happens when the painting steps off the wall?
Most artists find a style that sells and they stick to it. They become factories, churning out the same hit song over and over. Toney seems allergic to stagnation.
Lately, I’ve watched his work evolve into the third dimension. He isn’t satisfied with just the 2D surface anymore. He has started working with laser-cut aluminum and steel, layering these materials to create relief sculptures that mimic the topographical layers of the earth.
He is taking those vector lines—the ones he started drawing in his dorm room with a broken knee—and giving them physical depth. He is exploring how light and shadow interact with the artwork in real-time, changing as the sun moves across the room.
It’s the natural progression for a guy who thinks like an architect. He is building the mountains again, piece by piece, layer by layer.
Joseph Toney is more than just a guy who paints pretty mountains. He is a chronicler of the modern West. He captures the beauty, the fragility, and the structure of the places we love. He reminds us that even in a digital world, there is nothing quite as powerful as a simple line, drawn with conviction, describing the edge of the world.
Meet RAD Artist: Joseph Toney – Rumpl This video and interview showcases Joseph Toney’s collaboration with Rumpl, providing a visual insight into his creative process and his deep connection to the outdoor environment.
FAQs – Joseph Toney
How did a knee injury lead Joseph Toney to develop his unique art style?
Joseph Toney’s knee injuries in high school confined him to a chair, which prompted him to explore graphic design and learn to deconstruct mountains mentally, developing a distinctive visual language that combines athletic terrain knowledge with structural design.
What is the significance of Joseph Toney’s ‘Device Drawing’ method?
Toney’s ‘Device Drawing’ method involves using rulers, compasses, and French curves to mathematically reconstruct mountains, which simplifies the natural forms into geometric, memory-like representations that convey a sense of permanence and core structure.
How does Joseph Toney incorporate climate change into his art?
He harvests charcoal from Utah wildfires to create pigments for his series ‘Carbones,’ turning the scars of climate crises into haunting, monochromatic artworks that serve as a visual commentary on environmental destruction.
Why does Joseph Toney seek to paint murals instead of just canvases?
Toney chooses murals because they serve as public interventions, disrupting urban routines, forcing observers to acknowledge the wilderness nearby, and bringing natural landscapes into city environments.
In what ways has Joseph Toney evolved his artwork beyond traditional painting?
Toney has expanded into three-dimensional work by creating relief sculptures with laser-cut aluminum and steel, layering materials to mimic earth’s topographical layers, and exploring how light and shadow change, further elevating his connection to the natural landscape.
