Hank Keneally is inspired by dumpsters. “You are talking to the greatest dumpster photographer in the world,” said the 77-year-old artist. “But are there others? I could be the only one. ”Keneally likes to joke. “I’m a very serious guy,” he said. “There are few photos of me that smile. But I laugh at myself all the time. ”Related Stories I Support Local Community Journalism Support the independent voice of Phoenix and help keep the future of the New Times clear. He’s serious about dumpsters, which play an important role in his new mixed media series Wallescapes. People often walk past those big trash cans without seeing them, he pointed out. Or they use it as a canvas for graffiti. “These graffiti artists are my collaborators,” he said. “I take pictures of the dumpsters, paste the images into Photoshop, and combine them with one or two other images.” Lately he’s been covering the finished images with gesso and oil painting. Dumpster Mailbox combines vivid colors that are superimposed on an image detail; The Circle Knows is a portrait of peeling paint and graffiti on a warehouse wall. The response to Wallescapes was good; Keneally has shown the work in San Francisco and Phoenix, where it has been warmly received and sold well. He gently dodged talk of his success. “I’m not aiming to sell,” he explained, “although I won’t give the money away either. The real benefit of an exhibition is that I can step back and see my work in full. Artists often don’t feel like they have style, but when your work is curated and hung on the wall you can see that maybe you actually do. ”Keneally was more or less an artist from birth. His grandmother, a piano teacher, noticed three-year-old Hank rumbling on the Steinway and brought him sheet music; he could read notes before he could read letters. He studied photography with the renowned artist Jack Stewart at ASU and worked with an old view camera. “I know a lot of photographers who cried when digital photography came along,” said Keneally. “I didn’t cry. I know a lot of people look down on digital, but I was happy to give up on analog. ”Click to enlarge” Train Wheel Forms “is part of Keneally’s Wallescapes series. Learning to make art for Hank Keneally wasn’t easy, he admitted. “I didn’t talk about it before, but when I was 12 months old I had meningitis. It was a fatal disease in 1944. It affected the right hemisphere. I’ve learned to compensate with the other side. I use computer sequencing and logic and non-intuitive things to make up for what my right brain can’t. I got a master’s degree using my left brain more. ”He prefers to talk about more pleasant things. “I like the backs of buildings that haven’t been painted over. They have more interesting textures. When I take a picture, I compose in the camera. I look at the edge of the picture. I rarely cut anything later. For me, these pictures I take are a dance between us. ”Keneally once owned a cheap scanner that never got the right colors. Its reds came out orange, its blue was green. “I liked these colors,” he recalls. “I wish I had bought one of those $ 100 scanners.” Artists, he said, are just people who want to make a mark. “We have a great need to say, ‘I was here. I’ve lived. ‘”He thought about it for a moment. “However, I think that my intention to make art may be different. I think I make my vision of beauty and show it to inspire others to create their own beauty. ”Keneally wants to be 110 years old, so there is still time to inspire others. “I am in the best of health, do not take any medication, am a strict vegan and never get sick. I have more energy today than in my 20s. ”He put a lot of that energy into packaging a book with pictures from the first Wallescapes series. There are plans for a new series of mixed media images and visits to the Arizona Artists Guild twice a week, where he paints with longtime colleagues. “The other day someone asked me what I plan to do over the Labor Day holiday,” Keneally said with a sigh . “I told them, ‘I’m going to paint!’ What did you think I would do? ”
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