Photogram Painting

Here is my first experiment with new materials incorporated with my photograms.  I've uploaded a process photo, since this methodology involves several stages of development. 

Fist, I experimented with the ground on which I would do the photogram.  I found this awesome gesso at Michael's that, although a bit pricey, has the awesome effect of shrinking as it dries and thereby distorting the canvas and cracking.  Since this semester I am focusing on the erosion of the body and false identities, this seemed like the perfect material to experiment with. 

Secondly, I began a painting with no particular image in mind.  Mostly, I wanted to choose colors and strokes that were tuned directly into how I felt.  I began with warm colors and smooth gradients in the top right, but as my OCD sank in and I began obsessing over details, the motion became broken and circular with a colder and darker palette, which created an image very similar to the perpetual storm on Jupiter's surface.  I was not satisfied with the piece with just paint, however, and I felt like the darker area needed something else, something that reflected the weight and pressure of the manic desire for perfection.  So, I went outside and started pulling up grass and weeds, covered the canvas with glue, and threw it on and painted it in.  This enhanced the feeling of mania and hysteria for me, and connected a medium which I was in complete control with materials directly from nature that I attempted to force into my creative logic.

Lastly, I incorporate my body directly into the image with the photogram.  In the case, the emulsion literally becomes a mask, covering the color of the paint in black but unable to completely adhere to its underlying surface, much like my previous piece Touched. 

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this piece, but I know that it needed to be created and that my future works will in some way be influenced by what I learned here, and that may be the most important thing.  I've learned more through my failures in the past year than I have in my successes, and though the lack of concrete "progress" in my mind can be infuriating, it is nevertheless necessary.

Highlights of my work from the 2012 MFA in Visualization Fall Show

  

Imprints

My work demonstrates intimate realities that flow behind the façades I project into the world.  In conceptualizing these images I call upon the emotional undercurrents that clash with the carnal self; a self that enables one identity to conceal another.  Using a photographic emulsion and artificial light, I capture in silhouette the presence of my physical body.   The processes and surfaces resist my control; the resulting abstraction of the literal form articulate the otherwise concealed emotional and psychological structures.  The frustration of my inability to fully determine the outcome appear in the image as flaws, tears, fingerprints, and inadvertent patterns that communicate the dissonance between internal dialogue and outward appearance, revealing without my permission that which I had longed to hide

-R.J. Peña

Tortuous

There were many times in my teen years that I felt trapped and overwhelmed by an intense sensation of loneliness which was often magnified by the opposing pressures of conforming to normalcy and natural desires.  For the most part I was able to keep these feelings at bay during the waking hours with my obsessive over achieving, but during the night when all of my distractions faded away and all that was left was me and my mind, I endured an overwhelming deluge of emotions from claustrophobia to depression, anxiety, and loneliness.  The periods of pain were such that all I could do was clutch my sheets and curl into a ball, riding the torrents until they inevitably subsided.

In conceptualizing this piece, I wanted to bring all of the factors leading into these events into the image and use the resulting contortion of my body to disturb the surface that my form is projected upon.  When I felt myself returning to these memories, I clutched the fabric and curled my body much like I did when I was younger and was able to capture not only a physical representation in the imagery, but a tactile distortion of the surface that mirrors the dissidence within my mind.  The folds created during the performance fracture and distort the proportions of my limbs and demonstrate my warped psychology. 

When I viewed the completed piece with my professors we again experimented with rotating the composition to determine if there were any significant emotional/compositional changes and I was delighted to discover that the perceived emotion shifted based on the orientation.  The top left (also my favorite) feels as if the figure is falling and has been swept away by a torrent, the top right as if the figure is trapped within a box, the bottom right begins to introduce a sense of violence, as if the figure has been pushed or knocked over, completely losing its balance, and the final conveys the greatest sense of violence with the figure appearing to have landed roughly on its head.

Accident

So, as I have mentioned before, the process of working with the emulsion in the darkroom lends itself to many unintentional results.  There is a lot of fumbling around and bumping into things, and, especially in the case of painting the emulsion on the fabric, it is impossible for me to tell which areas have been covered and which have not.  This leads to me having to work intuitively, guessing and obsessing over areas that I feel have not been covered enough in accordance to what I plan to do with the image.  Much of my emotional state of mind is captured here, for if I am stressed my process is frantic, or if I'm careful there will be areas of evenly applied emulsion.  In this case, I was obsessive over the area I knew a particular part of my body would be which is evident in the area of thick, dark emulsion.  Somewhere in the process of setting up the light for exposure the dimmer switch got lowered, and so when Jace activated the light it was dimmer, not noticeably so, but dim enough to where when I painted the developer on the surface nothing seemed to happen.  At this point I panicked, and not being able to tell if I had accidentally painted on fixer instead of developer I grabbed the other container of chemicals and painted them on as fast as I could.  I didn't discover that the cause was the light until much later, and the effect of fixer mixing with the developer that was heavily soaked into the fabric produced this result: a completely abstracted image that appears random, but in actuality is directly influenced by my body and psychological affect during it's creation.  My body is present in the color variation and in the surface of the fabric, where the drying emulsion preserved the wrinkles I created, and the patterns and uneven emulsion describe my frustration and stress.  

When examining this piece in class, we decided to rotate the fabric in every possible orientation in order to observe how the compositional elements were affected by direction.  Surprisingly, this piece works in all four orientations, with different elements being either highlighted or diminished depending on your point of view.  What appears to be an abstracted open landscape in one sense may transform into a ruined city when reversed, or when the surface appears to be the star of the piece may suddenly become subdued by the emulsion pattern and distribution.  This is very exciting and something that I will continue to explore in other pieces.

Shift

I had mentioned in the last post that a piece I did a few weeks ago had led to a dramatic shift in the way that I approached the work I was doing.  It's been crazy busy, and so I haven't been able to update in the last few weeks, but now I have some breathing room and here is the post ! :)

There were a lot of unexpected results with this piece, being my first attempt at a full body photogram and my first experiment on the raw fabric that I have been purchasing.  The worst horror that I experienced was that because of the absorbance of the fabric, the emulsion did not spread evenly, which is the the cause of the random streaking.  In addition, I lacked a large container to process the fabric in so I had stuffed it into the gallon container containing the chemicals, and all of the excess silver soaked into the fabric and caused all kinds of weird green residue to appear.  On top of all that, you could BARELY make out a ghosted image of my body, and in my mind this aberration was a complete disaster due to my failed attempt at creating the image I had planned.

The next day I brought the piece in expecting harsh criticism, but instead was met with praise.  I was  confused by this and was unable to understand what my professors saw in the gross deterioration I saw before me.  However, upon discussing the piece with them, I came to understand that there is a performative aspect to this work that gives it a depth of meaning and interpretation that I had not anticipated.  In the patterns of the strokes you see the result of my intuitive gestures, and in the wrinkles of the fabric where I laid my body you see the physical evidence of my presence on the material.  In this way, my body becomes the medium and the emulsion captures a shadow converses with the physical manipulation of the surface.  I have never thought of art in this particular way before, in the performative, and I now understand a new way of creating images that are capable of revealing through chance more than I can ever plan to reveal.

Touch

    So now I've gotten comfortable enough working with the emulsion that I've begun to do more large scale works, even though using so much of the emulsion at one time kind of makes me cringe!  The last piece I completed, even though it did not turn out anything like I had planned or expected, had revealed an entirely new direction in which to take my art. 

    In this piece, titled Touch, I draw upon one of the most vivid and powerful memories: the events leading up to my first kiss.  At this point in my life, I was struggling greatly with the knowledge of  my sexuality and the fear of the consequences from my family.  At this time, my father vehemently forbid any expression of being gay, and forced me to go to therapy in order to correct the mental illness I was suffering from.  However, myself, being as strong-willed and bullheaded as he, knew that this was not going to change.  I had known my orientation from the age of 10, and had spent the previous 5 years concealing it and dealing with the emotional consequences on my own.  But this suppression had a backlash, creating an obsessive desire to find someone, to touch, to express these terrible desires that were forbidden, and yet pulling at my core as potently as the desire to survive.  When I finally found someone who was capable of returning my affections when I was 15, you cannot imagine the excitement, the relief of knowing I was not alone, that overwhelmed my senses.  Yet, even still, I was terrified of my father and what the knowledge of this discovery would do at home.  And then that summer, at a friend's birthday party in Galveston, I found myself outside with him out on the patio overlooking the ocean with a strong warm breeze washing over us and the sounds of the crashing waves drowning out everything but us in this electric moment.  At first we were just talking, each safe in our own sleeping bags, but the longer we looked into each others eyes the more irresistible the pull became, until suddenly we were holding each others arms.  Each of us were so desperate to touch one another and share this simple contact and yet so horrified at the thought.  Him with the backlash of religion and me from the strong boot of my father pressing on me. 

And then he kissed me. 

There has not been another moment in my life when the touch of another has filled me with so much thrill, so much wanting and need, than in that moment, and it is such things that I now feel the confidence in myself to express outwardly in my art. 

    Here was my process:
I laid a foundation of an oil based primer with my hands upon cloth, using my body to throw and spread the paint, leaving traces of my palms and fingers across the material.  I then used a paint roller to cover this with emulsion, almost erasing the traces with the medium I would then use to capture my body and that of Gavin, in the position that mimicked my memory.  Because the emulsion was a bit tacky, and because it could not bond properly with the oil primer, the contact with our bodies loosed in and caused it to tear where it contacted our skin, and later while processing, giant holes appeared.  The image has become a mirror or the emotional turbulence I had felt, a suppressed desire to touch, covered with a superficial appearance that was slowly degrading under the power of this primal need.

Visual Preparation for My Thesis Proposal

    This weekend was full of trial and error and retrial and more error, set on repeat.  There were lots of bugs to iron out with the darkroom, including but not limited to: faulty emulsion adhesion to the canvas, inconsistent fogging of the images, weird brown aberrations that appeared a few hours after fixing the emulsion, and the emulsion softening and becoming gel-like during the washing phase.  Here are a few images related to the errors:

 

    The image on the left shows the first tests I did on a few different materials.  The one in the middle is the artist's canvas I bought from Hobby Lobby, and the times of exposure on this strip was 3 seconds, 1.5 seconds, and 0 seconds..  One side is primed with some kind of gesso, probably acrylic.  A major issue we had was that the strips curled tightly upon developing and fixing.  I'm guessing this has to do with the developer affecting the acrylic primer, softening it and causing the fabric to distort.  The portion in the center that turned a weird black/brown color was where the emulsion was applied too thickly, and I believe the fixer was not able to penetrate into this area, causing a slow reaction hours after I brought it out of the darkroom.  One of the first errors I noticed was that the unexposed portion greyed significantly, which meant I had a fogging issue with one of the safelights in the darkroom.  To test this I got normal photo paper, turned off the Patterson Safelight on the desk, and exposed with the same time.  This is the test on the left.  With the Patterson Safelight off, I got no fogging. 
   Thinking the problem was solved, I stretched some rough white fabric that I purchased from Walmart (for a fraction of the price of the canvas from Hobby Lobby!) over a frame and coated it with the emulsion, and then I did two more strip testsjust to be safe.  The length of expousre was 1 second per region, up to 15 seconds.  The long strip on the left had 1 coat of emulsion, and the strip on the right had 2, just to throw in another variable.  The result had both unexpected and expected results:  Neither strip curled during processing, which was great news.  The strip with 2 coats and a deeper contrast range, which is definitely good to know, however added layer of emulsion softens immensely while washing the fixer off in water, and actually came off while I was patting it dry with a paper towel, which you can see in the middle.  One thing I was frustrated to see, is that the unexposed portion STILL managed to get severely fogged.  So I decided to do another test:  First, I put a paper towel over the opening of the overhead safelight to dilute the light even further.  Then, I coated the same Walmart fabric with 1 coat of the emulsion and developed it without exposing.  The result is the right piece of fabric in the leftmost image.  As you can see, there was a strange inconsistency in the tone of the image.  What I realized, is that before I stopped using the Patterson safelight, I had been coating strips on the desk near the light and, thinking myself frugal, was pouring the excess emulsion back into the bottle, and thereby unknowingly contaminated the whole bottle with exposed emulsion :(  However, now that I solved this, I could FINALLY move on with creating some art!

    The first images I decided to do were basically tests of different materials: glass and organic plant matter.  The glass I printed on watercolor paper and the grass I printed onto the Walmart fabric.  I had painted the emulsion of the fabric on a piece of cardboard, which gave me the happy surprise of seeing the corrugated pattern appear in the image.  Painting the emulsion with a brush also gave a nice brush texture to the image, which is cool.  The images on the right were the positive prints produced by the emulsion, and the images on the left are the digitally inverted versions of those.  I have two plans as to how to achieve this, which I will test soon.  One is a contact print, which is where I would lay the positive print over an unexposed piece of fabric and expose that directly to the light, theoretically getting a negative print of the positive image.  The other is using a small print of the positive image that is inserted into a small projector that I bought at Michaels which will project a large image of whatever is placed beneath it onto the wall.  Doing this would also, theoretically, give me the result of an inverted image. 

    Now came the question of what to do with the canvas I had inadvertently painted with fogged emulsion.  Since I knew I wasn't going to get the nice bright whites of a pure silhouette, I decided to experiment with some chemogramming, which is mixing the different processing chemicals to achieve specific effects.  I grabbed a plastic bag and some more grass and a miniature of a sculpture from a previous project and laid them onto the canvas, and then loaded a paintbrush with the fixative and splattered it onto the canvas.  After waiting a few minutes, I exposed the emulsion and developed, and just as I had hoped, the fixative had prevented to fogged emulsion from developing, and I was able to maintain some pure whites in the image.

     This is the inverted image of a print I produced last week, which I feel is more effective.  Hopefully, using either contact printing or the projector I will be able to achieve this.