By: Keith Estiler
studio visits
studio visits
Cj Hendry’s penchant for taking risks may cause outrage. But, she says it’s the driving force behind her rising career and over 300,000+ follower count on Instagram. After all, in 2015 the Brisbane, Australia-raised artist dipped a pair of $9,000 USD Nike Air Mags in a bucket of black paint in order to use as a study for a hyperrealistic drawing. Although some were infuriated by Hendry’s video of the Air Mag experiment, with one user labeling her effort as “talentless bullshit,” she says the criticisms haven’t stunted her creative output.
“You struggle to make work that's your own, and then you also balance with the Instagram community. You've got to remember, the motherfuckers on Instagram, 99% of them are just motherfuckers. They're not art world and they don’t have the nuances or the understanding of how it all works,” she tells HYPEBEAST. “You have to have fun with it on Instagram because you don't want to get too deep. You lose people.”
And yet, Hendry’s major breakthrough came when an Australian art collector saw one of her colored-pencil drawings on Instagram back in 2012. It was a 40- by 60-inch drawing that portrayed a ragged pair of RM Williams boots. Hendry says that the collector sent her a private message, asking how much she wanted for the piece. At the time, she didn’t have a clue on how to put a price on any of her works, but she decided to sell the drawing to the collector for $10,000 USD. The drawing is now worth triple that amount and possibly more. “The collector bought it straight away, and I was like ‘Holy shit,’” she says. “Things started selling just through Instagram, which is crazy.”
Cj Hendry's Road to
Art World Stardom
Exploring the otherworldly artworks of the Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
CjHendry.Live
Have you seen a big shift in Helsinki’s approach to fashion since then?
Cj Hendry
In the last years it's changed a lot. Now you can see teenagers buying Raf Simons and Off-White™, and all the super expensive brands. I guess their parents buy them the clothes, but in my days when we were teenagers we didn't have that expensive clothing. But I think it's fun that people are more interested in fashion.
At what point did you want to become a fashion designer?
It was really by accident. During my 20's I tried to find myself, I don't know, maybe five times. Then when I was completely exhausted and had nothing, one of my friends just said, “You were always a bit interested in fashion, why don't you try that?” Before that I was interested in doing something artistic, but I didn't know what it could be. After that I applied for sewing school and that was it. I hate to use terms like fell in love because that doesn't sound Finnish at all, but basically I fell in love with the idea of making something myself.
The artist believes she’s logged over 50,000 hours honing her composition skills to get her colored pencil drawings to the level of fine art. Hendry didn’t study art in college, nor did she reach out to industry experts for help building her career. Instead, her formal education was spent struggling to learn architecture and finance at the Queensland University of Technology. “I had spent two years doing architecture, and I was like, ‘uck!’ And so then after that I was like, fuck it, I'm going to go into finance,” she says. “So I went and did accounting and finance for a couple of years, and I failed almost every single subject. I kid you not, it was hopeless.”
Hendry’s first and only career advice came from a college friend who told her to drop out so she could focus on her art . She took the gamble and left university in her early 20s, giving herself a year to make it as an artist. “I'll give myself 365 days to see what could happen with no intent of anything,” she says. “I was just like, fuck it, I'll just draw and see where it takes me.”
To fund her career, the budding artist took up a sales associate job at a Chanel store in Brisbane. After clocking out, Hendry dedicated late-night hours to drawing designer goods in her parents’ basement. “I was drawing a lot of fashion items because, at that time, I was obsessed with objects and surrounded by them,” she expresses. “I've always drawn what was around me or interested me at the time.”
After creating artworks for a year in her parents’ home, Hendry felt she was ready to connect with contemporary art galleries to showcase her drawings. She didn’t want to stay in Australia, where she felt the opportunities for artists were limited. “Australia is very institutional and an unusual place for art. The biggest achievement for artists in the country is this old man’s award called the Archibald Prize, and it’s only for portraiture,” she says. “You have to draw a portrait of a famous Australian, and dude, are you kidding!? I don’t draw portraits nor am I interested in that.”
Hendry set her eyes on moving to New York City instead, feeling attracted to the more than 1,000 galleries spread across the metropolitan region. In 2016, she settled in her current studio located in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood.
Over the next couple of years, Hendry took part in four more solo exhibitions before launching her first immersive presentation, “MONOCHROME,” in 2018. Located inside a 22,000-square-foot industrial warehouse in Brooklyn, the elevated showcase featured a replica of a house with seven rooms constructed out of modular blocks. Each space, including its furnishings, was painted in a monochromatic color scheme, such as blue, yellow and orange tones. Hendry also mounted drawings on the walls of each room with the artworks depicting a crumpled Pantone card that complemented the room’s tone.
How would you describe your style when you were growing up?
The fortuitous sale of the boots catapulted Hendry to art world prestige, with an increasing amount of buyers vying for her works. An executive from Australia’s Macquarie Bank paid $50,000 USD for a drawing of a rumpled Gucci shopping bag. More widely-known owners of her pieces include Kanye West, who bought a piece of a $100 USD bill with a portrait of his face drawn on it alongside iconic fashion designer Vera Wang. And yes, Wang also owns one of Hendry’s creations.
Hendry believes that the extensive amount of time she spends creating her pieces validates their value. From 2012-2015, she says that she would work 15 hour days to produce drawings for an A-list clientele, with a never-ending queue of customers waiting to snap up every item she produced. “My practice is built off works where there's years worth of a waitlist and they'll sell out in seconds,” she explains. “My whole practice is not built off making money off people. I don't think I'm leveraging off idiots, it's more like there's a bigger concept and there's a reason why it's all being built.”
The prices of Hendry’s artworks are as titanic as her workload. It takes around three weeks for the artist to produce a single large-scale drawing of a designer bag, involving a variety of methodological approaches for her to complete the artwork. She begins a piece with finding an object that she wants to draw and then photographing it in various angles. Then, she uploads the image to Photoshop and adjusts the lighting to her liking. The digitally-manipulated photo acts as a guide to help her create a rough pencil sketch of the object before she blocks in the illustrated silhouette of the subject using colored pencils. “There are elements of creativity in what I do but it's very process-focused work,” she expresses.
How has your work evolved over the years?
I was doing reverse painted acrylic polymer peel paintings for a long time, and those were hyper-detailed and all super hard-edged and super meticulous. It got to a point with that where I guess around like 2012, I wanted to start doing something more visceral and more painterly and less sort of slick.
Any advice for aspiring artists?
Good advice is work a lot, experiment a lot, and see a lot of art. Find out who the artist is who you really admire and what do you like about their work, what can you bring into the work, but also how can you experiment with materials and make paint do something that's your own language. At least for me, that's always been really important to my practice.
“My practice is built off works where there's years worth of a waitlist and they'll sell out in seconds.”
cj hendry
“There are elements of creativity in what I do but it's very process-focused work.”
Following “MONOCHROME,” the artist decided that she wanted to launch similar presentations rather than showcasing her works in traditional, white-wall gallery settings. With this goal in mind, Hendry wishes to push the boundaries of her practice even if it means straying from creating her beloved hyperrealistic drawings. “So obviously, there's the drawing aspect and anyone can come in to see your drawings on a wall, but that’s not enough to get people to interact with my work,” she says. “I want to take my hyperrealistic art to a more unusual space.”
Hendry is all about smashing artistic conventions with her projects while creating elements of surprise. She teases that her next project called “RORSCHACH” will consist of “a psycho mix of things” that focuses on a series of drawings inspired by Rorschach inkblot tests. However, she confirms that there will be many facets to these trippy graphics including a 3,000-square-foot children’s bouncing castle that will mimic a psych ward with padded walls. “The Rorschach inkblot tests are usually just black and white and serious, but mine are colorful and ultra kitsch. I can't really explain it,” she says. “When the show's out, it will all make sense and the viewers will be like, ‘Ah, yeah I get it.’”
“RORSCHACH” will run through April 10-21 in a warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Stay tuned for our exclusive recap on the exhibition.
“There are elements of creativity in what I do but it's very process-focused work.”
Cj Hendry