“Am I an artist? No. Did I go to art school? No,” CJ Hendry blurts out almost defensively from her warehouse studio in Brooklyn, New York.
“Am I a trumped-up marketer? Probably. I’m completely unqualified in a whole bunch of shit. But here I stand,” says the hard-working expat Australian.
Her highly detailed drawings and flair for self-promotion have won her a vast social media following and phenomenal commercial success.
A helium-filled inflatable dollar sign, a PlayStation console dipped in liquid bronze, squish paintings that morph into Rorschach tests — Hendry’s work features the childlike and the everyday, in microscopic detail, slickly rendered in the style of luxury advertising.
Hendry is dismissive of her artistic process, but she’s clear she wants her work to move people. (Supplied)
Working from a reference image, the self-taught Hendry labours for hours and sometimes days to produce large-scale drawings on paper.
She uses a scribbling technique to simulate the texture and appearance of thickly applied paint or plush fabrics, or the petals of freshly cut flowers, producing a three-dimensional or trompe l’oeil effect.
The eye-popping drawings demonstrate extraordinary precision and technical skill, observing the reference image so closely that they might even be said to be better than the real thing.
But Hendry doesn’t like to dwell on this part of the process.
“I believe, in the art world, skill is completely irrelevant to art and being a good artist,” she tells ABC Radio National’s The Art Show.
“Nowadays I’m far more appreciative of concept and execution over skill.”
A social media phenomenon, Hendry was one of the first artists to use Instagram as a form of direct marketing, long before droves of unrepresented artists began capitalising on the free photo-sharing app.
More than 850,000 followers later, what was a solitary practice, drawing 10-12 hours a day, is now a healthy business with a studio manager and a small team, an uninterrupted flow of private commissions and collaborations with high-end retailers and even a luxury car maker.
It’s a long way from suburban Brisbane, where Hendry grew up, after her family emigrated from South Africa to Australia in 1998.
Choosing subjects like luxury and consumer goods, combined with marketing nous and a flair for self-promotion, have earned Hendry a global following and commercial success. (Supplied)
There’s an obsessive eye for detail, a methodical approach and herculean patience behind Hendry’s artworks — but it’s her marketing nous, salesmanship and high-impact shows that set her apart in a saturated market like New York.
“I am a commercial artist. That is what I am,” she says.
Hendry studied architecture for two years, before dropping out to study finance instead.
“This is the world I know,” she says.
“Am I a trumped-up marketer? Probably … But here I stand,” Hendry says. (Supplied)
Poverty is considered endemic in the life of an artist. But no two-minute noodles or instant ramen for Hendry.
“I think I am a natural marketer and a pretty shitty artist.”
So, what’s the appeal of her work, and why are some in the art world ambivalent about this university-educated, self-described “bogan” who has, for the most part, managed her own career independently?
How CJ Hendry became famous
Hendry didn’t finish her finance degree either.
Instead, she quit her part-time job and dropped out of uni to take up drawing, sharing the results with her followers on Instagram and, later, TikTok.
As a child, she was a “driven loner” and she carried that independence into adulthood.
“I’ve always been very focused and very, very busy … and I [am] just very happy in my own company,” she says.
Expertly tuning her followers on social media, Hendry knows how to generate buzz and her marketing technique is almost as flawless and seductive as her drawing.
Hendry’s drawings are seductive and hyperreal. (Supplied)
After moving to New York in 2015, Hendry made a name for herself by drawing consumer-fetish items but with a twist — for instance, a pair of rare Nike Air Mags dipped in black paint or shopping bags from Louis Vuitton or Gucci or Chanel, crumpled or discarded.
She has moved on from exclusively representing “luxury” in monochromatic pen and ink to a wider range of subject matter in the full spectrum of coloured pencils.
Commercial success has not only led her to expand operations, it’s also freed her to develop Instagram-baiting exhibition concepts.
To meet surging demand, Hendry engaged two studio assistants to help fill in her drawings seven years ago — and puts in about four hours of drawing every day.
She also has a small team to help realise her personal vision: planning and designing conceptual exhibitions that extend the artifice and excess even further.
Overcrowding led police to shut down Hendry’s latest installation, Flower Market, forcing it into a scaled back version of the show, in a Brooklyn warehouse. (Supplied)
These maximal installations are all about affect — creating artificial environments that tweak her audience’s innate sense of childlike wonder, with a side note that kinks their sense of reality — even momentarily — or the mere suggestion of something dark.
“I always like to f*** with an environment you might already know, and put a twist on it slightly”, she says.
Provocatively, Hendry and her team designed a purpose-built asylum for Rorschach, an exhibition featuring high-key coloured drawings of what were either children’s squish paintings or the ink-blot tests once used as an aid in psychological assessment.
The “asylum” — and centrepiece of the exhibition — was an inflatable, translucent white “bounce house” (like a jumping castle, with fabled padded walls in-built).
“Skill is completely irrelevant to art and being a good artist,” Hendry says. (Supplied)
Staged in a disused Gothic revival church, which she partly renovated for the purpose, Hendry’s first solo exhibition in London, Epilogue, was no less theatrical.
To offset a series of uncharacteristically sombre monochromatic pen and ink drawings featuring the withering blooms of freshly cut flowers, Hendry installed machines to continuously rain down “snowflakes” — recyclable, white, petal-shaped confetti.
It’s this aspect of her practice — the concept and exhibition design and not the artworks — that is, for Hendry, the most creative side of her work.
“The drawings are very cut and dry. You copy the photograph. Boom, done. I don’t even need to think.” (Supplied)
“The drawings are very cut and dry. You copy the photograph. Boom, done. I don’t even need to think. It just comes very naturally to me. It’s the thing that I am very good at”, she says.
If her drawing process is somewhat mechanical, the concept development and exhibition design process is the opposite — challenging Hendry creatively, and testing her problem-solving skills.
“What I’m enjoying about building these concepts and exhibitions [is] every single time it’s different, there’s always a challenge in terms of location, scale, what it’s going to be, how to make it economical — but also extraordinary,” Hendry says.
“I want to blow people’s minds. There’s so much I want to put out in these exhibitions … that is the thing that is not cut and dry.”
Hendry’s spectacular forays into the art world do present a philosophical challenge. It’s clear that the work is being presented as art, but is it?
‘What is art?’
Although she is a household name in New York — a city still regarded to be the centre of gravity in contemporary art and where the world’s major commercial galleries and auction houses are based or have premises — her work isn’t critically reviewed.
“I’m far more appreciative of concept and execution over skill,” Hendry says. (Supplied)
Truth is, her Instafame, client list or the profitability of her business don’t matter a jot in the art world, or to those who might fairly decide whether what she does is indeed contemporary art — or something else.
Hendry says it’s not a question she spends any time thinking about.
“My care factor is approximately zero. I mean, what is art? Art is so subjective. It’s a beautiful, unregulated industry,” she says.
“It doesn’t bother me if people think I’m an artist or not. It’s also none of my business.”
If Hendry’s commercial success tells us anything, it’s that “the hand of the artist”, and the long established Western art traditions of verisimilitude and trompe l’oeil are still highly prized by the art-buying public — even if not by the art world.