art
Life and works: Above, samples and supplies from James Henninger’s studio. At right, Henninger applies a blowtorch to pennies for a sculptural project.
But surely some talent is necessary to seal the deal? Nope. “That’s all it is. Practice, practice, practice.” Just this once, don’t believe him. 2. Before his leaving at 15, there was his father’s ex-wife, who painted. “A lot of ethereal stuff — this was during the ’60s and ’70s,” Henninger says. In Southern California. “She did a lot of astrology-type stuff, constellations and so forth.” The subjects don’t matter; what mesmerized 5-year-old James was watching her create something out of nothing — art’s primal dynamic, after all. It was a life-shaping realization. “Since then I wanted to be as good as or better than her. That was one of my goals.” Southern California in the late ’70s and early ’80s must’ve presented a rich zeitgeist from which an eager and developing young artist could draw: the waning of disco, the rise of West Coast punk, the first stirrings of West Coast hip-hop; the dawn of the Reagan era; the surf and skate scenes; Hollywood. But even then
30 | Desert
Companion | June 2013
Henninger was stubbornly focused. He says almost none of that cultural tumult found its way into the pen-and-ink drawings he did then. Figures and faces, remember. And art classes? A waste. “I didn’t get what they were trying to do, or the rules, I never really understood,” he says. “So I always wanted to do my own thing.” Two decades of mostly crappy jobs he’d take to keep himself in art supplies — “you name it, I’ve done it, from concrete work to drywall, construction and fast food, once” — found him a few years into his second stint in Las Vegas, taking stock of his life. Fifty hours a week working in a print shop, riding the bus a few hours every day. Frustrating, that. It left him too little time for art. He’d graduated from drawings to acrylics, and then to encaustic (pigments mixed with wax). His work had taken on new levels of photorealism — and, at last, salability. He began to make as much from selling paintings as from his full-time job. About a year ago, he called his girlfriend, Gia Iacuaniello, also an artist. “I told her, ‘I’m gonna quit my job.’ And she goes, ‘What are you and what do you do?’ Well,
I’m a painter and I want to paint. And she was, ‘Then do it.’” He did, and hasn’t looked back. “Pretty much this man lives and breathes art,” Gia says. “I’m not sure we talk about anything else, really. If he is not painting he is reorganizing his paints by size and color, and his tools by what medium they are used for.” 3. If you want to shape your life rather than be shaped by it, to remain in your studio instead of laboring at a construction site, here’s one way. Say you decide to learn how to paint with encaustic, not one of your more common techniques. You give yourself 30 days to figure it out. In that time, you don’t draw, you don’t sketch, you don’t pick up a pen or a brush. You’re still working in the print shop, but somehow you plow through hundreds of pages of information on encaustics, packing in everything your brain can hold — recipes, history, techniques, other practitioners. You learn to make your own wax-pigment cakes instead of buying them. You create and build a tool to