James Powell Hendricks

Artist James Hendricks got his start drawing moon rocks.Today, his style has evolved into abstract art created with buckets, push brooms, carwash brushes, squeegees, hypodermic needles and even plasti

Artist James Hendricks at Thompson Fine Art in North Little Rock.
Artist James Hendricks at Thompson Fine Art in North Little Rock.

— James Hendricks’ passion for art didn’t overshadow his love of science. It merely enhanced, colored, shaped and deepened that love.

Over the years, his paintings have evolved from realistic moonscapes to riotously energetic explosions of color and texture.

Hendricks was a pre-med student at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville when he signed up for his first art class, simply to fulfill a fine arts course requirement.

His earliest assignments were realistic landscape paintings, followed by abstract ones, and painting on collages made with bits of black, brown and white paper.

“I had never done a painting in my life,” recalls Hendricks, who now lives in Northampton, Mass. “Then the teachertook these up and put them on the board and said, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever seen.’ It was fantastic.”

He left Arkansas in 1963 to pursue his art career but maintains ties with his home state.

Greg Thompson, owner of Greg Thompson Fine Art in North Little Rock, who has represented Hendricks for 17 years, had just finished college when he met Hendricks in 1993 during Hendricks’ one-man exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center.

“At that time I was doing large-scale paintings, but I think the biggest I had gotten to was probably 7 foot by 6 foot, which is not a small painting, but he had paintings that were bigger and as an artist I was very excited and talked with him about how, from a technical standpoint, he could get canvases that were 8 feet by 12 feet,” Thompson says. “He kind of told me some of the secrets of his trade and we just kind of became friends.”

Hendricks has since created much larger canvases - one titled Millennium Express that hangs on the living room wall of his Northampton home is 44 feet long.

It wasn’t just the size of Hendricks’ works that caught Thompson’s eye, though. It was the “energy, complexity, the grace. His work is so three-dimensional and it has so much depth.”

Hendricks works on canvases flat on the floor of the 2,000-square-foot studio behind his home so the thick paint he pours onto them won’t run, and hefts them onto the wall for more delicate work - fine lines, cross-hatching, circles - and so that he can stand back and study.

He rarely uses traditional brushes, opting instead for buckets, push brooms, carwash brushes, squeegees, hypodermic needles, even plastic ketchup bottles.

“I worked on top of it,” he says of Millennium Express. “Originally, each section was built with a plywood box on top so I could run out across the painting, so those long throws of paint were when I would get a bucket loaded and run out across the surface as fast as I can and then try to stop when I get to the end before I run against the wall. It was a performance in a sense, a physical performance.”

ENCHANTED CHILDHOOD

Growing up in Little Rock, Hendricks and his older sister and their single mother lived with his grandparents on 14th Street, at the edge of MacArthur Park.

“I could walk across MacArthur Park and go to the Boys Club and walk around at 11 o’clock at night when I was 9 years old. I never had any worries about anything,” he says. “Everybody in the neighborhood was friendly. It was tough but it was a loving mother and an enchanted childhood.”

Integral to these memories are the Ozment brothers, who had moved to Little Rock while their father was in medical school.

Steven Ozment, McLean professor of ancient and modern history at Harvard University, was in fourth grade when his family left Little Rock and was surprised to hear from Hendricks in the 1960s.

Hendricks was teaching art at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and had come across Ozment’s name among a list of Guggenheim Fellowship winners.

“We just shared everything with each other back then and I just kind of remember that as a kind of Little Rascals period of my life,” Ozment says. “I was the tough guy on the block in Little Rock back then, and he was always the kindest guy - he’s not the kind of guy to get into hard-knuckled fights. He’s just a very sweet guy, so we were a perfect match. He’s one of the kindest people I’ve met.”

Ozment and Hendricks see each other frequently; their homes are just a couple of hours apart.

“I love to go and visit him because the artwork that he’s doing now I think is the best artwork he’s ever done, so it’s always a thrill to stop by his studio and go in and have a talk with him,” he says.

Dr. Kerry Ozment, who lives in Hot Springs, has bought a few of Hendricks’ paintings.

“I just loved the color and energy,” he says. “It just was very stimulating to look at his work.”

Hendricks asked Ozment to supply him with hypodermic needles about 10 years ago.

“At first I was concerned,” Ozment says and laughs. “But when he told me what he wanted them for then I wasn’t too worried about it. When you see his art - it’s so many different lines and colors and he uses mops and brooms and syringes and all kinds of things - you can understand.”

MOVING TO THE BIG APPLE

The Ozments have learned over the years a bit about the winding path that led Hendricks to his current profession.

At 21, Hendricks took a year away from his pre-med studies in Fayetteville to spend time in New York at the urging of a fraternity brother.

“I had always been attracted to New York for some reason,” Hendricks says. “He says, ‘Why don’t you drop out of school for a semester and stay with me and see what New York has to offer for you?’ We drove across country in his mother’s Buick to Manhattan and I spent a semester there. It was fantastic. I wore holes in all my shoes walking the streets. It was too late to go to college there, to take any courses, so I went to an employment agency and said I’ve always been interested in Wall Street. They sent me down to 1 Wall St. for some interviews and I took a math test and they hired me as a foreign exchange clerk.”

He got a night job as bartender’s assistant at Top of the Sixes.

“Then we would go down to the Village and we would stay up until 4 a.m. and then I would get up at 8 or 9 and go back to do my bank job,” he says. “It was a great experience in New York. And I came down with [mononucleosis] and the doctor said you better go home to recover so I flew back to Little Rock and stayed at my mother’s house and recovered and decided I wouldn’t go back to New York and I went back and finished pre-med.”

After graduating from the University of Arkansas, he completed a master’s degree in fine arts at the University of Iowa at Iowa City in 1964. A friend recommended him for a job at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

“So, here I was 26 years old and got hired at this major New England college, an exclusive college for women, in 1964.”

He taught painting and figure drawing there, just three years after he did his first painting.

A few years later, he took the job teaching at the University of Massachusetts and retired from there six years ago.

Hendricks had time away from the classroom, like most professors, to pursue his painting.

“They provided me with a studio so I was free to do anything I wanted,” he says. “You pursue your own imagery, not what you have to sell. It didn’t make any difference if I sold it or not.”

MOON ROCKS

His early paintings were closely tied to his affinity for science.

In high school, his grandfather set up a makeshift lab for him in the backyard.

“I had chemistry sets and things like that and I was so interested in atomic energy that I wrote to the Atomic Energy Commission to get a license to buy a quarter pound of uranium,” he recalls. “They said you can buy up to one-quarter pound of Uranium-238. At that time I think it was around $20, which was a lot of money for me in high school.It came in a canister and I cut it in half so I would have two pieces and I got this metal box, graphite, so I could put them in there with control rods and I put together a Geiger counter with parts that I ordered so that you could listen to the radiation when the rods were in there. It was a demonstration reactor.”

He also liked to climb on the roof and study Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and the moon craters with a 30X telescope.

“When NASA had these flyovers of the moon back in the ’60s, I would clip out all the photographs and use them to make paintings from,” he says. “They looked like the moon surface - not abstract, they were realistic paintings, but they were my take on it, kind of.”

While teaching, he would travel to New York on the weekends, calling on galleries in hopes that someone would be interested in his art. After a spate of rejections, he found Ruth White, who had a tiny gallery on 57th Street.

White, who was about 80 to Hendricks’ late 20s, not only offered to host a show for him, she asked him to be her escort to openings at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“I drove down and she took me to this night opening at the Modern and introduced me to all these incredible artists. I met Seymour Lipton, I met Barnett Newman, all these people were standing around and she knew them all. She was well-connected,” he says. “Then we took a cab over to the Whitney, and they had an opening the same night, that was the Franz Kline show there, which is one of the abstract expressionists.”

From there, one of his moon paintings appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and the Smithsonian Institution showed his work around the rotunda where the first moon rock was displayed.

“The year after that I was put up for promotion for tenure at UMass where I was, so I wrote the director I knew down at the Smithsonian for a reference and he wrote back and said 2.5 million people have been clocked at viewing James’ show down here so he probably has one of the most expansive shows for a faculty member that you’ll ever have,” he says.

UPLIFTING ART

Hendricks soon bored of copying photos of the moon, and in 1971 his style evolved into abstract painting.

“Looking back on it, a lot of it was luck, just chance and things fell into place. I met people along the way just when I needed inspiration and that help, people that believed in me,” he says. “They just fell out of the sky when I needed them to guide me through this whole thing.”

That includes the way he met his wife, Leslie, who was an art student of Hendricks’ former wife, and later of his.

“She was in the class and she was extraordinarily interesting, but she was, you know, just another student. She had two classes with me and then she graduated,” he says.

Hendricks’ ex-wife suggested almost 10 years later, after they divorced, that he call Leslie. He called her at her family’s heating and oil company, which she now owns. They married 13 years ago.

Dr. Steven Boatright of Little Rock discovered Hendricks a few years ago when he went to Thompson for help finding art for his new endodontics office.

“When I look at his art, I don’t see colors and geometric figures and all the intricate details as much as I see a spirit released. It’s his inner spirit that comes out through the art,” he says. “He’s full of life, and I think people who are unhappy don’t like his art. It’s uplifting to those who have a positive spirit and love of life and love of people. If you don’t like his art, you’re probably suffering with some negativity problems on some level or another. He is the most positive person I know.”

Hendricks gave Boatright a painting lesson a couple of years after they met, and he says Boatright has come eerily close to imitating his style.

“I can’t do it to the level that he does it at all - I don’t claim to or pretend to - but he says I can copy his work better than almost anybody,” Boatright says.

Hendricks’ admirers lament the fact that his art doesn’t mesh with the darker, more pessimistic tones of today’s art world.

“My goal in the future is to try to get some of my work in the major museums in the world. I’ve got some success with smaller works in the Arts Center here and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. They’ve got a couple of small works onpaper, and there are, I guess, a half dozen museums that have the work around,” Hendricks says.

“But until you become a blue-chip celebrity, it’s hard to get the work in there. It’s a struggle. Until you get the attention of the critics - and right now they’re into a postpop, anti-American mode if you look at the magazines.Very negative. ... Saying you’re spiritual or inspired is a joke in the art scene in New York. I don’t care; I’m going to stick to my guns.”

SELF PORTRAIT James Hendricks

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Aug. 7, 1938, Little Rock.

IN HIGH SCHOOL I WANTED TO BE A physicist.

MY PAINTINGS ARE Hopefully sublime experiences that will change one’s life, because I think in the fortunate ones there is that spark of interaction.

THE MOST EXCITING THING I’VE EVER DONE IS Going to Willem de Kooning’s studio in Long Island and sitting down with him for a few hours and having him talk about my paintings with me.

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING ON EARTH IS Love, spirit. Looking into spirit. When you’re in love and you look into someone’s eyes - you know, the old songwriters, more romantic back in the ’80s, used to sing about that, that you see paradise.

MY FAVORITE INDULGENCE IS A brand new gallon of cadmium red light or a Jhane Barnes shirt (Designer of high-end clothes for men - $300 shirts). Or a good cigar.

THE BEST TIME OF DAY FOR ME IS When Leslie comes home. My job is to cook so I make the dinners every night.

I KNEW I WAS A GROWNUP WHEN I don’t think I ever knew that. I don’t really feel like I’m grown up yet. I guess it’s keeping that childlike naivete.

IF I COULD RELIVE ONE PART OF MY LIFE IT WOULD BE Probably age 7 to 14. The worst time in my life was high school. I was poverty-stricken and didn’t know it.

I WANT TO BE REMEMBERED For motivating and inspiring people. I think that’s something I’d like. I enjoy that - seeing others succeed, especially students.

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Transcendent.

High Profile, Pages 37 on 12/04/2011

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