Hunter Benesh and Eco-Friendly Art vs. the World
Written by Annika Mandrekar
Majoring in Natural Resources Environmental Sciences, Hunter Benesh (now a senior at UIUC) has found a creative and unique way to mix his two passions of art and nature in an environmentally conscious manner.
“I didn’t really wanna spend a lot of money on canvases, and you know those signs you see everywhere? I would kind of just bike around and pick them out of the garbage” Hunter chuckles as he shows me his big stack of signs. “It kind of started off as me using them because I was frugal, but then I started to consider that I could spread (a positive) message that you don’t need a whole lot to make something, you just have to be creative.”
Looking around Hunter’s room, which he likes to call his studio, I noticed that (the majority) of his paintings were used from the recycled signs. He explained to me how his passion for the environment sparked his decision to keep using old signs instead of canvases, especially since most people can’t even tell the difference when looking at them.
Although he was always into art as a hobby while growing up, Hunter started really getting into it as the pandemic just began to hit. He started to draw every day as a stress reliever and it took off from there, as he (would) continue to draw daily for the next three months.
Photo: Newly painted Burning Man done by Hunter while staying in the “Palace” - a unique room in his fraternity that he would spend two years in. (February 28, 2022)
“Every day I would draw something,” Hunter explains, “and eventually I really started to consider myself an artist…you know, I think I could take this a little more seriously.’”
Hunter’s art style originally started off on a more surreal note, detailed in many of his earlier works (in which) he would incorporate facial features such as the eyes, mouth, nose, and ears into a vivid surrealistic painting. One of the first pieces I’ve ever seen from Hunter, now titled “Struggle,” delightfully demonstrates his insane creative talent with the way he utilized the parts of a face/body and twisted them into a bizarre, Inception-esque fever dream.
The artist reveals his thought process behind his decision to use a face as the focus of some of his artwork, saying, “I kind of just had this idea of wanting to practice facial features in different angles and I didn’t wanna dedicate a whole page for that, so I would kind of like mash them all together
Photo: Hunter points to Struggle, a recycled IKEA painting completed over the course of 3 months. Also pictured is Hunter’s first acrylic painting Deep Dive, an upcycled coffee table created to tribute the legendary album Deceptive Bends (1977) by 10cc. (April 22, 2023)
