Photo by Trip Burns.
Sometimes, white walls can be a person's biggest inspiration. For Hunter Davenport, the blank walls in his apartment—along with the lack of monetary funds to decorate them to his content—stirred up a passion he had never before pursued.
"While I was in the apartment, we had nothing on our walls," he says. "And all I was doing was working, so I had all this down time at night. Finally, I was like, 'Well, I'm going to start painting and put some stuff up on the walls.' It was just absolutely too expensive to go buy decorations for everything."
Davenport, a Jackson native, lived in Nashville, Tenn., and Evansville, Ind., before returning to the Jackson area with his family the summer before his first year of high school. The first in his family to attend college, Davenport enrolled at the University of Mississippi, although he returned to Jackson and worked 40 hours a week at Mint the Restaurant while earning an associate's degree in liberal arts in 2013 from Holmes Community College.
The 24-year-old finished his first work in early November 2013. The tetraptych painting, which consists of four adjacent canvas panels that hang at slightly different heights, is a black-on-white monochromatic depiction of flowers and branches. He made the piece to cover a blank wall in the living room of his apartment, which he moved in to with his sister, Chelsea Bonds, in August 2013.
"I didn't want it to look like I was finger painting," he says. He consulted Pinterest for inspiration and found that some people use masking tape to create shapes to paint around. "I thought if I stenciled out the flowers, that would be the best painting that would come out of me because it was my first one."
His success with that first painting gave him the motivation to continue creating. That same autumn, Davenport started a Facebook page, called The Boom Box Projects, for his work. "I was really wanting to display my work and not just be sending photos to my friends saying, 'Oh, look what I finished,'" he says. "I also created it because I wanted a lot of other people, and especially some of my friends who were kind of in the same situation, to also be able to display their stuff there, too. It's for everybody, not just the stuff that I do."
Since he began painting last year, Davenport has sold more than 50 pieces of art. The first painting that he sold was a depiction of an owl that he did for a friend who wanted something similar to what she saw in a store. Things accelerated quickly. He sold more pieces in November, and in December, someone commissioned Davenport to create several paintings to give as Christmas gifts.
"My inspiration comes from the diversity of the world around us and people's minds and how we think and how we see color," Davenport says. "My paintings seem to be a spectrum of different things, and it's going to stand out on one end or the other end, depending on who's looking at it."
Davenport's painting surfaces mainly include found items that he preps. When painting on wood, for example, he first coats the surface with a clear sealant to keep the wood from absorbing the paint. As an event designer for Eventful, he spends a bit of time in warehouses, which have dozens of unused and unneeded wood panels lying around. He also paints on items such as wine bottles and drink coasters.
"I'm all about being green, and I think recycling is the best thing," he says. "I'd rather turn the trash into something pretty that someone would want in their house instead of it being something that gets thrown away."
While Davenport has been able to make money with his creations, he still considers painting relaxing and fun hobby. He wouldn't mind getting art training in the future, but he isn't too worried about it right now.
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