In 1989 I was 25.

When I started making paintings.

Los Angeles, 1989.

My name is David Hinnebusch. I'm a Los Angeles based painter (with too many other creative pans in the fire!) I started painting in my apartment at the Lincoln Place Apartments in Venice, California, were I lived with the guitar player Nick Chavez of our punk rock band Entropy.  I was working the night shift in post-production for (mostly) Viacom TV shows (like Beverly Hills 90210) at a place called Pacific Video (soon to be Laser- Pacific), and after work I would drive my old blue 1970 Grand Torino (I bought from my brother Andrew for $500!) and go visit my girlfriend at Cedars Sinai Hospital in West Hollywood. She was in ICU and out so I'd hold her hand and take a nap.) Then I'd head to Santa Monica City College where I had been re-taking classes I'd failed a year earlier. Since graduating high-school in 1982, I'd been taking mostly art classes like silk-screening to make t-shirts and art prints for Entropy, but then started taking a lot of business classes which I loved and thought would help me DYI the band's success, but was too messed up at the time to pass the classes. So here I was at SMC in 1990 at 11am re-taking accounting and for fun I added a painting class. I'd started liking making art in my senior year of highschool, but at the time was more interested in music and creative writing. All the good flyers for our band were made by Nick (outr guitar player). Maybe it was the exhaustion or the sadness about my girlfriend (who later recovered) but I fell in love with painting in that class. The teacher (I forget her name) was ruthless.  She ripped the brush out of my hand and corrected the line of the female model's breast. "You're objectifying her. Paint what you see!" Wow, 30 years later my ears still heat up thinking about that. Maybe it was her, I don't remember, but while at SMC I took a class in women's studies in which we read "Backlash" by Susan Faludi. I believe it informs my work to this day. I am a bit obsessed with the female form and essence of female power, but I try to balance it with self-portraits (to fight my own self-hatred) and surf-oriented tourist art disrupted by my love of punk-rock and nerd stuff like ideas found in books! (I got the name for Entropy from a book by Jeremy Rifkin.)  That was in 1990. I never stopped painting from that class on. I would put up one 54x54" canvas on the wall to the left of the TV, draw a grid on it and paint. I painted 10 paintings from that time. In 1992, I got into the production side of the film business and soon after  attended a special art school (at SMC) started by Joan Abrahamson and run by Laddie John Dill called the Santa Monica College of Design, Art and Architecture.

That's it for now. I've had my Shopify site for a few years now but, except for the Pet Oracle Cards I did the art for, haven't sold much here. I'm hoping in 2021 that will all change!

My next story: When I sold my first painting.


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