Camera Experiments

I went out to a park in Los Angeles up in the hills originally to test out my new Canon 60D photographing skaters in a small skate park, but as usual reverted to abstracting my surroundings.  All of these images were created solely in camera, with only some minor color adjustments in Lightroom.  No filters or composite layering of any kind were used to create the images.  It truly is amazing what long exposures and inducing camera flaws can produce!

New Website!!

So for anyone out there who hasn't already seen me plastering this all over Facebook, I have a new website with all of my work from my MFA series, along with pricing, size, and medium info.  I'm still going to be posting my casual art stuff here, along with the descriptions of my processes and whatnot, though there may be a bit of a lag while I graduate and figure out what I'm going to be doing with my career.  Here is the link!

R.J.'s new portfolio site

Final MFA Body of Work Piece!!

Carnal Map #4
6.5' x 6.5'

I am happy to announce the completion of my final MFA body of work piece!  It's been an incredible journey that has completely changed the way I view my art, my life, and my past, and I know that it is only the beginning of something even greater.  I plan to have my final show and defense mid-March, location and time TBA, but I will be sure to let everyone know.  Also, if anyone has questions concerning the subject matter or my process, feel free to email me at raymond.penajr@gmail.com and I will be happy to explain!

2nd Pass of a Final Piece

    Completed a 2nd pass on this piece today.  I added blown up printouts of a journal I kept during my undergrad, and let me tell you how terrifying it is for me to put them there.  I literally had panic running through me as I read the entries, some of which contained detailed descriptions of my darkest thoughts that are more in depth than the posts that I put on this blog.  After placing them on the canvas, I immediately began a process of burying them and concealing them once again from view. However, eventually I was able to realize that hiding and concealment has been such a huge part of my life for so long, that I needed to excavate it and reveal it in order to accept myself and past.  Therefore, I began to wipe away what I had buried and reveal the texts (some of which the ink had begun to bleed and distort from the moisture, which is interesting).

    Overall, I was finding it difficult to tune into my memories today, so to experiment I took the painting outside while it was dark and continued to work on it in very minimal light.  Just enough that I could find my tools.  Since the concept of this piece is the blind search for self, I figured I might as well try to do it literally and see what happens.  The result?  A very intense emotional recall of some very specific and terrifying moments of anger and frustration connected to my inability to connect with others due to my fear of condemnation.  The passage in the upper left of the painting is where this took place, and in some places my brush strokes became so violent they stripped the layers of plaster underneath off the canvas.  Eventually, I got to the point where I threw the brush out and literally applied paint through my own hands, clawing and wiping at the surface as my body became tuned to the frantic search for form and structure that my memory was surfacing.  As usual, I'm not sure how I feel about the results, but currently I don't think I can observe the piece until the residues of disgust and frustration are washed away over a night's sleep.  You can also compare this iteration to my previous version here.

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.

The Darkroom is Complete!

Here it is!  This finished darkroom.  The final touches were stapling the internet cable along the bottom of the wall and filling in the light leak from the hole it came through and a few smaller light leaks that remained around the windows.  I discovered when light directly hit the side of the house the foam board actually became semi-translucent when your eyes adjusted to the dark, so we ended up having to put some of the ram board we bought for the floor over the foam board, and then just for good measure put some foil tape around the perimeter just to make sure absolutely no light would creep in.  I mixed the developer and fixer in two tupperware like pitchers with airtight seals, which I believe should be safe enough for the chemicals.  The one Patterson safelight that I bought isn't quite strong enough to give me enough light to work in, so I'm going to hit up a photo supply store out in Houston for a bulb that I can put into a standard lamp, which should give me the illumination I need.

 We ended up having to reverse the swing of the door into the room because it was too difficult to come in and out without disturbing the curtains, which was a light leak threat.  This way you are able to open the door, step into the light lock, close the door behind you, and then go through the curtains.

And here is my first attempt at photogramming!  For whatever reason, either proximity to the light or the intensity of the bulb, the paper seems to be ultra sensitive.  My first attempts at doing exposure strip tests at 1 second intervals produced completely black strips.  This image was created literally turning the lamp on and off almost instantaneously.  I think tomorrow I'm going to go back to Home Depot and get a much smaller bulb at the lowest wattage I can find and test that out to see if I can get a little more flexibility with the timing.  I created the image using my hand and shreds of a plastic Walmart bag, and painting the developer onto standard photo paper.  Because the paper has such a high gloss, the developer tended to pool in little puddles, which is where the white holes in the image come from.  Also, a bit of a happy accident, the words printed on the bag just happened to appear directly parallel to my arm.  There is something very appealing about that in combination with the form of a hand grasping through the silhouettes of the plastic bags...I think I'll explore some of that later.

The Sculpture is Almost Complete!

We have delivered Julio's sculpture and set it in it's location with
the shape of the landscaping roughed in. Tomorrow we will be digging
the trench for the stones and adding sand and liner for the
foundation, and finally adding the river stones to the center and
copper accents on the piece itself. More updates to come before the
week is out!

Lambda Photography Workshop

    A few days ago I participated in a creativity workshop at the Houston Lambda center, and went on a little photography tour of Market Square in downtown Houston.  Blistering swampy heat aside, I was able to capture some really cool scenes in some very unlikely places.  Mostly I wanted to use this opportunity to try out some abstract photo techniques, especially non-standard aspect ratios and extreme close-ups of contrasting shape and texture.  I have always been fascinated by the fact that you can look at something every day but not really notice the depth and beauty of it's lines and textures until someone photographs it.  Then all of a sudden it becomes something beautiful and creates not only a new perspective on a space, but becomes a conduit for what the individual sees in his mind's eye.  You normally don't think that something as mundane as a manhole cover or a fan can be beautiful until you're laying on the ground at odd angles, getting up close and personal with some rust.  And even if you look at a photo and it seems uninteresting, you can do some fantastic things by cropping it in crazy aspect ratios and focusing the image on the sometimes small area of the photograph that is unique..
    Above are a few samples of what I came up with, and there are many more where that came from!  What I am taking from this experience is that when coming up with a composition, or looking for a way to express your vision with a camera, don't be afraid to tilt it and get so close to your subject the lens is practically resting on it.  Then just snap away, even if it means using 20 pictures on one subject.  The more compositions and angles you explore, the more you have to examine and play with later.  The results will most certainly surprise you!

Jaded

This is my personification of the state of being "jaded." To me, this state is a prison created by your own mind. It blinds you to the potential of good in your life and keeps you bound to a wall of cynicism and pessimism. I show this with the figure cloaked in a hood and trapped inside a decaying room, organically designed and lit with low key lighting to bolster the sense of a dank subconscious space.

Concept for a new painting: "Sapped"

I got the idea for this painting last night at 5am while eating with some of my co-workers after work. It's based on my emotional reaction to some events that have transpired over the last week and the perpetual drain I continue to feel while out in the night life constantly. I often feel like such an oddball around people these days with my intense emotional consciousness and deep rooted sense of loyalty and integrity. I don't understand how people can be in a relationship with one person yet play around with others and still consider themselves loyal and in love with their significant other. These concepts totally throw me off balance and as whacked out as it sounds I almost feel like I'm socially retarded. And it's not like it's based on one or two experiences...it's as if the entire world has accepted a flippant and flighty lifestyle of shallow lusts and half-ass promises of endearment. Am I alone in feeling this and doomed to be sapped away by the manipulative predators in the world? I sure hope not.