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!

Asterisk*

Here are some highlights of my work in our end of the semester show for Viza631.  And in case you're wondering, yes, the pictures of pieces that have fallen off of the work is indeed intentional.  My work is designed to degrade slightly over time, as the changing surfaces mimic the fluctuating nature of memory and perception

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.

First Pass on a Final Piece for the Semester

As usual, exploring the effects of different orientations

close-ups of specific techniques of burial and excavation

So this painting is 4' x 8', and the scale is critical to the theoretical basis of my work this semester so the pictures really cannot do it much justice but I'll do my best to give an accurate depiction of what's going on here.

Staring at the huge blank canvas before me, it was incredibly difficult to make the first marks.  For whatever reason the sight of such a large area of pure possibility can be slightly paralyzing, and I have this fear that my influence will ruin that purity.  To help myself, I chose one of the intuition exercise to serve as a map for my emotional state:

Now I am not using this as a 1:1 sketch for an exact composition, but more of a guide to assist me in honing in on a particular emotional memory.  In doing these exercises, I am able to quickly sketch and express and remain true to emotional responses without the distractions of conscious mental processes.  However, working on a piece of this scale I am unable to maintain a continuous expression simply because I have to pause so often to prepare materials.  To remedy this, before I start throwing things on the canvas I stop and meditate on these sketched images to tune my intuition back into the region of memory response that I achieved during the sketch, and once I achieve that start letting my body create what it wants.  I literally use no constraints as to what artistic techniques I use: if I want to throw dirt and plans in with the paint I go outside and dig a hole and mash the dirt into the canvas.  If I want plaster to dig through I mix up some paint and plaster and glob it on and start digging through it, or if I want to cut through the surfaces I find the nearest object and started scratching and grinding away.  The process is incredibly liberating, and much like the photograms reveals much more than I ever could have consciously chosen to demonstrate.

As I worked on the piece, the meditations on my memories began to take the form of a mad scramble, as if I were digging to uncover something that I knew I needed though not knowing what it was  This is what it was like for me, especially in those first few years on my own as the strict rules that governed my younger years broke down and I built a new framework to live by.  This concept took root in my mind and I naturally began to look to earth and organic matter to form the surface upon which I literally dug through to uncover previous layers on the canvas.  I plan to continue to incorporate different materials over the next month to build mass on the surface and to further support the sense of history and discovery I am working towards.