45) Nature Flesh

Painting. Nature Flesh. 2009

Acrylic paint and mediums.

After i was done with "Modernizing Porongo," we had a special guest who was going to teach us all about acrylic paint and mediums, how they work and what we can use them for. I already had a background on acrylic mediums and had already experimented with them the previous year, but i realized that what i knew before was nothing compared to what i was learning at the moment.

Nature Flesh was the successor of Modernizing Porongo, maintaining the same concept but at the same time, integrating what i had learnt.

Nature Flesh is an installation that i created using several separate pieces made of fabric, paint and pouring medium.

For my installation i used a new and one of my favorite painting techniques that i learnt. On a glossy surface such as glass or plastic, i would pour lots of pouring medium, creating with a palette knife the shape that i wanted, and i would add a bit of acrylic paint on the medium, pigmenting it. (I added several colors for different finishes in each piece) Once the medium was dry, which usually lasted about 12 hours or a day sometimes, i would slowly remove it from the surface and i would get an awesome, almost translucent piece of what was really just paint. In many of these pieces i added the fabric that i used in my previous installation for better texture.

My installation is called nature flesh because each piece reminds me so much of the meat markets in Peru., in the way they hang the meat for exhibition, the natural colors and the organic shapes and textures they possess.

I hang my pieces in a tree at a park next to my house and left it there for about a day to create public reaction. It wad so much fun walking around the place looking at people's reaction to my work.

I want to thank my little brother for helping me set the installation up. I love you.

44) Modernizing Porongo

Painting. Modernizing Porongo. 2009

Mixed media.

I found the proposal essay i wrote about this piece somewhere in my hard disk, and i will just show it to you because it's the best way to describe this piece and the reasons i had to make it.

"The title of my project is Modernizing Porongo, El Porongo is a Peruvian company that started creating contemporary handmade decorative works using Peruvian techniques, materials and styles during the 1980’s. Modernizing Porongo is therefore a way of representing the Peruvian art that many people within the country have been practicing since the early pre-colonial years with a slightly different interpretation. I chose to create this piece based on Polly Apfelbaum’s fallen Paintings because of the similarities it has with the Peruvian modern art and the concept of “feminism”.

El Porongo creates art for the sake of decoration; it reveals, like Polly’s fallen paintings, the capacity to redefine “women’s work.” Apfelbaum believes that to be feminine one must push the boundaries of one’s position but balancing both the playful and the serious, and the way I intend to do that is by pushing past the traditional disciplinary forms of Peruvian art into pop culture, giving it a more modern-western touch but maintaining its own techniques and materials.

My piece will be a horizontal flat on floor piece just like Apfelbaum’s Fallen Paintings, and it will be more of an installation rather than a one piece painting. I will use different materials other than just canvas and I want to use a long, maybe 15ft x 15ft fabric, velvet if possible. The piece will not be like Polly’s pieces, it will reflect her minimalistic and modern ideas, but it will create a different reaction on the viewer due to the strong change of colors, materials and style. I think that by making this piece I could definitely open new modern ideas to my culture and hopefully enhance Polly’s feminine concept on contemporary Art."

The images and drawing i added to the piece are all related to peruvian culture, for instance this monkey figure comes from the "Nazca Lines" in Peru.

When i presented this piece, it was flat on the floor so that viewers could interact with it, (I still want to make it bigger, and create a much bigger installation so people would really have to walk through it to see everything) but in the picture i am showing here, the piece in on the wall because i didn't want to ruin it after i took it home, so i had to hung it and make sure it would stay intact.

30) Commodity of Art

Painting. Commodity of Art.2009

Acrylic, acrylic mediums and other on canvas.

My final piece for the course was about the commodity of art. We were supposed to create a contemporary piece representing an issue about contemporary art, using the mediums and the new techniques we learnt in the course.

I chose to create a piece that would represent what i thought of most contemporary art at the moment, how, nowadays, artists make art not just for the sake of art making and expressing ideas and emotion but more for the money they would make out of it.

This first picture was a rough draft of what my final piece was gonna look like. I decided to depict my idea by adding bills, coins, information about art commodity and money symbols into it. I always liked addict objects and texturized mediums to my pieces because they give my painting a rough looking finish.

The fact that my piece was pretty abstract already tell that it is a modern piece, but in order to make it look even more contemporary, i decided to use different sized canvases and put them all together as a single piece. The overall size was pretty big, i forgot what exactly but probably about 1.2 x 1.2 meters.

This piece has lots of small details that you can only really notice looking at it in person, but these are some parts that were zoomed in. As you can see, i added coins and pieces of paper that were half folded so the viewer could have some interaction with the piece, because i like my art not only to be looked at but also to be touched.

I brought my painting in pieces all the way to Peru, i framed it and hung it in my parent's living room. ;)

29) Family Portrait

Family portrait. Acrylic mediums and image transfers. 2009

Acrylic, acrylic mediums and ink on board.

By this point, we were learning all about acrylic mediums, their properties and how we can use them to make our paintings look better.

"Acrylic medium is basically the same as acrylic paint without the pigment. We can use it as paint additive, an adhesive, and a texturizer, and it can also be used to create image transfers. It comes in three basic weights (medium, gel, and paste) and two finishes (matter and gloss)."

I loved the idea of the image transfers and i started testing it on my own during my free time. There are several ways of transferring an image using acrylic medium, and after trying several of them i found that the one i feel more comfortable with was using the matte medium.

Basically what i had to do was print the image that i wanted to transfer in a normal paper and using a brush, i added the matte medium on the top of the picture, waited for it to dry and added another layer. I did this process about 3 times until there was enough medium on the picture. After i was sure that the medium was all dry, i put the picture in water for a couple of minutes so that the paper would get soft and be easy to remove. Right after taking the picture off the water, i started removing the paper from the back by gently rubbing my fingers on the surface in circular motion. What it does is that the ink gets stuck in the medium, so that when i removed the paper from the back i had a piece of transparent medium with the portrait of my family, which i afterwards pasted on the canvas. This is very useful because not only it looks more artistic, but also we can paint and add colors to the image ourselves without worrying that it might tear or that it might loose its color.

When i started working on this piece, i had no idea that it was going to turn out to be something nice that i would once hang on my wall because the reason why i did it was just for practice and experimenting. I really wanted to try the image transfer and i had also recently bought lots of textured mediums that i wanted to try and see what they were used for. So while i was simply experimenting i realized that what i had done was pretty cool, so i took it with me to Peru, framed it, and now its hangs on my parent's house wall. (I love it)

The writing at the top is a lovely poem for my family that i found at the time and i just loved it, so even thought it's written horizontally, and many people might get neck problems trying to read it, the meaning is still there and i think it look more artistic and creative.

13) Framed Marbles

3 sides cornered frame. 2007
Crystal balls on board.

"One of the themes i am working on is the 'different dimensions'. This is the beginning of a bigger piece of art where dimensions and perspectives are manipulated, modified and authorized by me. I chose to make the frame in a way that it exploits the idea of the 3rd dimension, and i filled it with crystal balls to add up to the 3D and a more vivid view. The shininess and the perfect circular shapes of the marbles express the simplicity and pureness of nature, which is something that i love." - Pilar Rodriguez 15/10/07

Applying the same ideas from the previous piece, i create this new cornered frame. This time i added a bit more of challenge to the work by adding an extra side to the frame, and by changing the texture of the 'eyes'. Some of the feedback that i got from the previous piece was that if i was intending to portray eyes, i should have used a more realistic and believable material, like crystal balls. In this piece the crystal balls are a symbol for 'eyes' or nature.
I kept experimenting with the idea of the 3rd dimension, and i wanted to keep experimenting with it little by little before starting on a big 3D piece. Which you will see later on.

12) Eyes

Cornered Frame. Eyes. 2007
Mixed Media. Styrofoam or canvas.

Combining both ideas of Damien Hirst (Except this time i didn't use real eyes, but simulations if them) and Yoko Ono, with the idea of a cornered frame.

I wanted to expand my boundaries from a flat plane to the third dimension. I created a simulations of eyes (Of all living animals) and pasted them onto a canvas on a cornered frame, which i made myself and painted in bronze, so that when hanged on a corner it gives the sensation that you are constantly being looked at.

8) Eye Non sense

Damien Hirst's 'Natural'. 2007
Green Jello, Cow and Goat eyes.

We finally got freedom and I started creating pieces of my own. In my entire life i had always seen a type of art that was completely opposite of what i do or what i thought i would always do. I never really understood why people had that stereotypical belief that 'good artists' tend to be weird and creepy sometimes, so i needed to try that. I wanted to go all wicked for once and see how that felt, and that's how i decided to follow Damien Hirst.

Hirst, a British Artist, known for his 'Natural History' series, which present dead animals (such as sharks, sheeps, cows) in vitrines, preserved and sometimes cut-up in formaldehyde. This caught my attention and became my main inspiration for my piece.

In my piece, instead of cutting an animal in parts and preserving it in formol, i used cow and goat eyes (That i bought in a Ghanaian market. 'Makola' Market) and placed them inside green jello that i bought in Max Mart, a grocery store (Pretty good one too, i used to get everything there lol). After i had finished placing all the eyes in the jello and taken them out from the fridge, i cut cubes of jello with the eyes in it and placed them in small cubes i made of glass (I also bought the glass in the market... you can really find anything there it's awesome).
My final piece was 6 of those small cubes with an eye in each of them. The weirdest thing i had ever done in my life.

5) The Infinity of Art

Genre. 2006
Mixed Media.

The Infinity Of Art (Text Written in 2006 -11th grade)

"The idea each person has about art differs from one another, nevertheless non of them are wrong. This piece, made out of everyday materials (Toilet paper rolls, and a long string), is a Dadaist reaction to the writing of Leo Braudy who criticizes the idea of genre, a classification of art.
The spiral i made is a contradictory object that goes against the concept of the categorized 'genres' but at the same time it's an object which belong to what people call DADA. Puttig a spiral made out of toilet paper rolls on the floor, for some people, doesn't mean anything, and for that reason, because it makes people question whether it is art or not, because it is completely different than anything else anyone has ever done and because of its absurdity and uniqueness, it is a Dadaist piece.
'The Spiral' symbolizes infinity since it can go on forever. However, because it is impossible for a human to reach infinity, i chose to put all those mirrors surrounding the spiral, giving it a sense of never ending. The reason for why i chose the 'infinite' symbol is because art, in my opinion, has no limits. No one and nothing should stop you from feeling free to do anything you want to do and then call it a piece of art, not even should you be limited by the already set styles, the movements.
The different colors in the spiral represent the different genres of art, that when put together create a unique art object."