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"The Daily Press Magazine", March 2, 1990
'D' is for Determination
Five years later, the student who rarely finished a piece of work, preferring instead to doodle, is being featured in a leading art publication. Hunt, a Hesperia resident, is being profiled in the March edition of the magazine, U.S. Art, as an "up and coming" young wildlife artist. Hunt sent photos of some of his paintings - notable for their realistic, almost photographic quality - to the editor with a letter explaining he was a young artist worth watching. "The editor told me they had just decided to do a series on up and coming wildlife artists and I would be one of the five featured," Hunt said. Good timing and self confidence put the 23-year-old artist and his work on the pages of a national magazine, but it took him two years to realize he could amount to something in art - and that he wanted to. Hunt graduated from high school in Arizona with a "D" in art. "The teacher was going to fail me because I was goofing off, but he didn't - he liked me," Hunt said. Throughout his high school career, Hunt said he would draw cartoons and scribble, although a friend always finished his assignments. "Although I never took it seriously, I still got an art scholarship to a college in Illinois, but I lost it," Hunt said. "My friend in high school went to college and I did nothing." "Nothing" was doing odd jobs and pulling weeds - the closest Hunt got to becoming a landscape artist at that time.
Two years out of high school, at the age of 20, Hunt decided he needed more money. Perhaps he could make money from that artistic talent he once had. "I was always looking at other people who were creatively inclined and thinking that I couldn't do anything," Hunt said. "Then I realized I was overlooking art." Hunt found a box of oils in his house, but recalled art classes when the oils would not mix to the right colors. He swapped them for acrylic paints - now his favorite and most successful medium - and started drawing basic lead pencil pictures. "That went on for a while until a friend bought me colored pencils and said, 'I want to see something in color, finished,'" says Hunt. Working in color was a slower process than pencil drawings - and that went against Hunt's personality. But Hunt kept at the task and produced what he considers to be one of his best pieces, a color study of tigers. As with most of Hunt's work, this first picture presents
wildlife in such copious strokes and naturalistic hues that it resembles a
photograph. The link with photography is not accidental. Hunt never paints his bird and animal subjects from sketches made in the wild; a camera is his drawing pad. Back at his Hesperia home and studio, Hunt strives to reproduce each feather and fold of flesh, using colored pencils and acrylic paints to create as naturalistic a creature as possible. Fine brush work duplicates the filaments of a feather down to the last wisp. Hunt sometimes uses a projector to throw the subject's image on a wall, from which he makes a tracing. The paper tracing gives Hunt a kind of contour map of the creature's body, which he says, allows him to reproduce it with photographic accuracy. A typical Hunt background is an empty block of color that grades from dark to light shades. He applies the paint with an airbrush to achieve the effect. "A lot of artists have a mumbo jumbo philosophy, but I'm a simple person who just draws pictures," Hunt said. "I only want to do beautiful pieces of art that people will enjoy." Hunt sells his paintings, supplementing his income by working at a commercial art firm in Los Angeles. The public can see his work at Gallery West, in the Tower Center on Highway 18 in Apple Valley. He hopes someday a wider audience will appreciate his work in movie theaters and magazines. His goal is to become a commercial artist on the level of Drew Struzan - artist for "Back to the Future." It appears Hunt is on the way to proving an art teacher wrong.
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