DRAWN TO ART

Jonah Rosenthal, a self-taught 16-year-old artist, emulates the masters to develop a style of his own.

After a post-school workout at New Trier, Jonah Rosenthal will grab either a guitar or a pencil—his tools of choice for creatively whiling away the afternoon or finding escape from the intensity of the Trevian workload.

The high school rising junior has created art for as long as he can recall. “It’s just something that’s special to me—no matter what happens in my life,” he says.

As a fourth grader at West School in Glencoe, Rosenthal put his emerging skills to work creating comic books based on his friends’ lives. It was around that time he adopted his nom d’artiste, “Jonis,” after his principal accidentally mispronounced his name and it stuck.

His artistic talent could very well run in his genes—his mother painted in college, his father sketched in high school, his great-aunt is a pastel artist, other relatives have been cinematographers and photographers, and his sister is a dancer.

Inspired by famous paintings and internet images, Rosenthal enjoys recreating surrealistic, impressionist, and neoclassical images. Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksiński, English artist Ivan Seal, and French artist Claude Monet are among his favorites.

Most of Rosenthal’s work is done in graphite, found in a No. 2 pencil, and some in charcoal. He likes mechanical pencils best, using them to create Summer ‘24 Cicada and the fanciful Valentine’s Angel.

“I prefer mechanical pencils because the tips don’t get dull, and the erasers are usually better,” he explains. “Charcoal makes mistakes stand out, so it’s more of a challenge.”

Rosenthal usually doodles in 10 to 15-minute sessions at a time (dryly noting that he finds it an effective tactic for procrastinating on his homework) or sets aside time to draw during the weekend. It takes him between 5-10 hours to complete a drawing, with breaks in between. His longest work of art took him two months to complete. “It’s a prolonged process,” he says. “The works take longer than you’d expect, just by looking at them.”

The time spent on these pieces is not only a measure of his dedication but, Rosenthal argues, also makes his work worth looking at in our digital age. “Especially right now, with AI and art, you can create a hyper-realistic, detailed image from your imagination in 30 seconds that would normally take 10 hours to draw,” he explains. “But I find beauty in the fact that a human toiled over a piece of paper for 10 hours—I think it’s special that so much human effort can be put into an art piece, especially in pencil.”

Despite his never having formal art training, the level of sophistication has grown dramatically over the years. His recent pieces not only show incredible technical skill but also convey a rich emotional depth.

The most difficult piece he has done was based on The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, which was painted during the French Revolution in the neoclassical style. The painting depicts the assassination of the French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was stabbed to death by Charlotte Corday while taking a bath. “It’s this pretty intense and dramatic painting,” Rosenthal says. “Recreating it let me explore creating textures, like making the cloth look different from the skin. I like doing drawings like that because it gives me a lens into the process an artist goes through. When you recreate the work, you can understand why the artist made certain stylistic decisions.”

Rosenthal also references magazines as an artistic aid. “There’s a lot of great photography in old magazines from the ‘50s and ‘60s for drawing or learning shadows,” he says.

When the weather is nice, Rosenthal has a fondness for creating art outdoors. During summer camp, he would visit a spot overlooking a lake to draw. He now finds the North Shore to be the perfect “sanctuary” for art. “Churches in Glencoe have nice courtyards, it’s gorgeous and serene—any excuse to get around churches is brilliant,” he notes.

The young artist spent last summer as an intern at The Art Center Highland Park, where he was exposed to different styles and types of media. Watercolor is his latest medium. “I find watercolor expressive,” he says. “It’s kind of a midpoint between oil painting and sketching because you can still see the outlines of the sketches.”

Rosenthal offers this advice to other young artists: “Don’t be afraid to start. The most important thing to know is that if you take 10-15 minutes to doodle every day, you’ll get better. Keep doing it for a year, and you’ll be far better than the average person.”