Connor Hornby
Connor Hornby makes hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings of ordinary objects marked by human use. A worn boxing glove, a handmade plush sunflower, a chess piece, or a crumpled shopping bag can become the subject of a work requiring hundreds of hours of sustained attention. The aim is not simply to demonstrate technical control. Hornby treats these objects as records of human behavior, history, discipline, and attachment.
He grew up aware that his father was an artist. Graphite portraits of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Judy Garland hung around the family home, and Hornby was struck by the fact that they had been made from pencil and paper alone. Those early drawings prompted years of trying to achieve realism and photorealism himself. Portraiture remained a central focus until his mid-to-late twenties, when he began turning more deliberately toward objects.
Hornby studied art at school and briefly at college, but left after about three months. He knew that art was the only career he could genuinely imagine, but did not respond well to being told what or how to make. His training has instead been based on repetition, self-direction, and time. “If I kept putting in the hours several times a week, my ability would improve and eventually my own style would emerge,” he explains.
The artist’s developing interest in art history gave this technical commitment a wider frame. Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, René Magritte, Edward Hopper, and Arnold Böcklin are among the artists who have shaped his thinking, particularly through their ability to make reality psychologically charged or unexpectedly strange. Contemporary artist C. J. Hendry has also been influential in demonstrating how an ordinary object can become compelling through extreme attention.
Hornby’s current drawings focus on objects after life has happened to them. A pristine object may be visually pleasing, but wear, damage, creases, and folds introduce evidence of contact. An old boxing glove suggests repetition and discipline. A crumpled shopping bag contains a more mundane history, but still records use. “The marks, creases and imperfections are evidence that somebody has handled them and lived with them,” he writes.
The work asks viewers to reconsider how closely they observe the material world. Most objects are passed without sustained attention, yet drawing them at this scale requires careful study of texture, light, form, and damage. The questions that follow are simple but open-ended: who owned the object, how often was it used, why was it kept, and what does its condition reveal? Hornby also insists on beauty as a central concern, resisting the assumption that contemporary art must abandon visual pleasure in order to remain serious.
A 2023 portrait of Mike Tyson became a turning point. Technically, the drawing represented a major advance and took more than 150 hours over roughly six months. Yet its success also made Hornby reconsider portraiture. He had devoted months to interpreting an image made by someone else and began to feel, in his words, “like a cover band.” The experience led him to photograph his own objects, construct his own references, and seek authorship over the whole image.
Hornby is currently working on his largest and most detailed drawing to date: a pair of 1930s leather boxing gloves. He hopes to exhibit the work where its scale, surface, and accumulated decisions can be experienced in person rather than through a phone screen. His broader ambition is to build a body of work that is exhibited and collected internationally, while retaining the independence and curiosity that first shaped his practice.
