Thursday Salute to Originals: Art for Amusement’s Sake
Australian artist CJ Hendry has established quite the cult following. Her hand drawn, larger than life sketches have garnered an elite audience, with buyers lining up to pay tens of thousands of dollars for one piece. With such serious odds at stake, it’s refreshing to hear a bit of the back story behind Hendry’s creations – namely, that her latest collection is inspired purely by fun.
Hendry’s “Alphabet” series depicts helium balloons in different letters or characters. Glancing at the works, the shiny wrinkled surfaces come to life in photo-realistic quality. However, there’s one catch that goes beyond the surface – these are not photos, they are highly detailed sketches! Taking up to 3 weeks to generate a completed rendering, Hendry uses black pen to render the balloon letters in a painstaking level of detail.
The alphabet is a fundamental building block of our language and culture; so ubiquitous that we rarely take time to stop and think about the individual characters as we devour the written word at lightning speed. But Hendry doesn’t seem to concern herself with the content, as she describes creating the works because she “just likes the mirror effect and the reflection of the balloons, but mostly because it’s just fun!”.
For unabashedly having fun in an all-too-serious genre, we salute Hendry for bringing a refreshing honesty to the meaning of her works. Her interpretation (or lack thereof) of her own works sits at surface level, and sometimes that is just enough.
Sources: Executive Style, The Cool Hunter