We were lucky to catch up with David Hendren recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have David with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
My work ethic comes from my parents. My dad has chilled out in old age, but when he was younger, he was a force of nature. I spent my adolescence just trying to keep up. And my mom is incredibly resilient and smart. From a young age she encouraged my creativity.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I am a multi-media artist, working in Los Angeles since 2009. I work in various media: sculpture, painting, sound and performance. But recently, I shifted my focus to glass painting. I make these paintings by arranging cut and bent pieces of colored glass into a composition, much like a collage. These arrangements are fired in a kiln, and fuse into a single sheet of glass.
I think more as a composer than an image maker. I find meaning in arrangements, the relationship between parts, their tensions, rhythms, negative space, and how these elements sit in the picture plane. I think about the structure of music, how tones and rhythms locate the listener within a space, within a mood, and how this translates to image. Most nights in the studio, I push pieces of glass into different iterations of a composition, like a rehearsal. Each placement feels vibrant and improvised, like playing an instrument. Everything sits near the picture plane. In this relationship, the work has a lifted quality, where nothing feels locked in place, a dynamic arrangement burned into glass.
I am currently working a series of new paintings, gathering ideas for the framing components and making final decisions on some of the larger ones. Hopefully I’ll finish in the next few months and get them into the world.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
It sounds obvious to me now, but it can’t be overstated how important it is to hang out with other artists. Start your own scene. When I was younger, I thought the work was the only thing. And it’s important to make good work, work hard, all that. But ultimately the work is only as good as the conversations it creates. So start with your friends. Go see shows together. Argue. Challenge each other. The pressure to conform to a more familiar life increases the older you get, so make friends with like-minded people. I wished I had realized this earlier.
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
I read Don Delillo’s White Noise in my early 20s. Nearly all the literature I had read up to that point described an older era, different from my own. White Noise is set in a present day college town, something that felt familiar to me. The book is full of dialogue that deconstructs contemporary society into underpinning forces. After reading it, the world felt intensely new, like my eyes were dragged into the present moment. I learned to look deeper, to draw from an essential fabric. The ideas in the book don’t directrly influence my work, but it taught me how to feel-out the bigger picture. Much like the act of drawing, good writing teaches you how to see. White Noise, and really all of Delillo’s work, does that for me.
And in case you are wondering, I loved the Noah Baumbach adaptation that came out recently. The performances were great, especially given Delillo’s quirky dialogue. And it included several of my favorite passages from the book. His version of the pivotal “airborne toxic event” was strickingly similar to how I envisioned it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://davidhendrenart.com/
- Instagram: @davidduncanhendren
Image Credits
I took the studio images. The pictures of the glass paintings were taken by Joshua White Photography
