Category Archives for: Art Process

The Display Dilemma of Flat Toys

15 March 2020 by Rey Armenteros

When I show my art in person, I run into an obstacle I didn’t even know was there. The other day, I got together with some friends for dinner. This group had not seen my work in a long time, and since they were curious, I brought a few small paintings. They were intrigued by the double-sided nature of the work and immediately went into the problem posed by such a venture. “How would you display it?” As one of them was asking this, I appreciated that he felt both sides deserved the merit of being seen, but I never gave consideration to displaying both sides.

My friend was offering a couple of ways off the top of his head. He thought of the type of frame that could be screwed into the wall perpendicularly jutting out instead of flat against it. You could turn to one side and see one side of the painting and then go around it to look at the other. I knew such a thing was more effort and expense than I was willing to give this, and there was also the problem of someone accidentally running into this tiny open door and tearing it off the wall.

He thought about mirrors. He said I could have the panel several inches off the wall and install a mirror behind it. Personally, I hated mirrors in art. All it said to me is that the viewer is also a part of the work. It made the viewer self-conscious, and I wanted my viewer to somehow get lost in the fragments of color and forms I had to offer. And we both agreed that with mirrors, there was always the danger of having the glare come off one of the spotlights, unless it were angled just right. Again, it sounded like an enormous amount of effort for one display opportunity. In life and in my work, I was a lot simpler than that.

Yet, I was caught up in the momentum of coming up with ideas, and I told them how I recalled this one show at the Getty Center that showed some of the pages from Leonardo’s sketchbook. Since many of these drawings shared a sheet with something on the other side of it, they put these things in frames that were screwed upright onto pedestals, like they do for sculptural objects. The viewer was able to walk around them. I was all excited coming up with this as if I had any intention of doing it, all of us concluding that that might be the best answer. Again, expensive and work-intensive.

I was at a stage where I felt like my work was double-sided by the way fate had brought me here. I had little control. It was necessary that my paintings were double-sided, and so they were. But I was under no obligation to show that other side of it, if it didn’t feel missing from the equation.

The most reasonable way to look at this complication was that I only intended to show the frontside of the painting — unless the backside were better, of course.

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Flat Toys – How to Make Them

29 February 2020 by Rey Armenteros

When thinking about two-sided painting, questions might come to mind. I have a specific way of making two-sided paintings that may seem pretty involved. As I described before, I don’t paint on both sides. Essentially, I paint on one side of a see-through substrate called acrylic glass (also known as “plexiglass”). Whatever I paint first on this plexiglass will show through on the other side, forming its backside. Whatever goes on top of that is the frontside.

My painting steps are more complicated than that, however. I first paint on acrylic skins. These are paint skins I create by painting layers of various acrylic mediums on silicone bakeware or some other material that acrylic paints will not adhere to. When the skin is finished, I paint an image on it. When that is done, I peel it off the bakeware surface to use on a painting. I then take the plexiglass and set it on top of the skin. Like someone using tracing paper to emulate an image under it, I begin the same image on the plexiglass, but I like to look at this part as continuing the painting instead of tracing. In a way, it is no different than directly painting on the acrylic skin except now you have this transparent plastic in between it and the brush. Many of the elements from the original image on the skin never make it to the plexiglass. So, even if the two versions of the image appear similar, there will always be differences. And this difference should be enough to argue that this is not merely copying — decisions are being made at every step of the way.

The step where I am painting on the plexiglass is known as reverse painting. The aspect of this to remember is that a reverse painting is nothing like a regular painting. For one, the first marks you make will be the ones on the top of the image and not vice versa where in a regular painting the first marks are often lost under the layers of paint. As you add layers of colors, you are soon sealing off anymore contributions to the image. So, reverse painting has a finite number of marks that will be seen through before everything gets covered up. It is unlikely that you can correct mistakes or follow changes of heart, unless you catch them quickly before the drying phase is over.

A reverse painting also feels nothing like a conventional one. The surface has that flat, smooth plexiglass finish which gives the painting the slick look of a manufactured product. It can never even hint at the textures of a traditional painting. I enjoy the opposite qualities of the two sides. It also makes the painting more of an object because more than one side matters. You can hold it in your hand and turn it around.

When I am done with the backside, I come up with an underpainting for the frontside. Basically, these are colors and shapes that I feel will work well with the original paint skins I had started the work with. After I arrive at something satisfactory, I adhere the paint skins onto the plexiglass panel using an acrylic medium, which will bond the paint skin to the surface of the painting; this is using acrylic to stick acrylic onto acrylic, which is a fusion that is physically strong.

After a few finishing touches to the front, the painting is done.

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Flat Toys – The Origin

17 February 2020 by Rey Armenteros

It started with the idea of plastic, some years ago. My paintings were now acrylic, and I was becoming interested in the notion that they were essentially plastic. Basing everything on some obscure nostalgia for my old toys, I soon concluded I wanted my paintings to become entirely plastic, and this included the substrate on which they sat. After some time exploring to find what surfaces would work with acrylic paint, I settled on acrylic glass. With this final component, they would be one hundred percent plastic, and I would call them my flat toys, which was an oblique reference to the poetry book, Sad Toys by Takuboku Ishikawa.

But transparent substrates posed the see-through problem. If the backside were transparent, wouldn’t it behoove me to use this feature somehow? I recalled how some painters used it to do reverse paintings. This technique is when you paint on a transparent surface in order to see through the backside. If I followed through with it, both sides of the painting would be active. A double-sided painting felt more like a toy because it was an object you can turn in your hand. Also, on a philosophical level, duality was the language I used when reasoning about life and the world, so it suited any ideology I might push forward in an artwork.

This is a simplistic overview of how I arrived at this feature in my art, but it might show how I have been making double-sided paintings for the past several years. It has gone through a few phases. When my paintings were under the influence of Tarot cards, I argued that the backside shared a convenient metaphor with the backside of a card. Those paintings had backsides that had an abstract motif with my monogram on it. When I stopped making my version of the Tarot, my paintings simply had backsides because I felt they should all have backsides.

Then, I had the idea that the backsides should mirror the fronts. This gave some interesting results but it was tedious to make, slowing down my process to a crawl. I then felt that if it had only elements from the frontside and made these parts look amenable to viewing if someone just so happened to turn the painting around to look at the back, then that was enough. These elements could be images or objects that I felt needed clarification or that I wanted to see in a different version, such as a reconfigured color scheme or added or subtracted features. I could play with this type of reverse painting for variable backside results. If I wanted to include the entire thing in reverse as a see-through underpainting, then I could go all the way and see what happens.

These newer backside ideas were relinquishing all manner of results, and I was happy with some and not with others. I felt that the backside was there and the painting had the potential to be flipped if I felt like viewing its other half. Oftentimes, the frontside was the stronger side, but there were times the backside shined brighter. And in those uncommon cases when the reverse painting is more effective, wouldn’t it be better to display that side outward when it came time to show them?

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The Unlikely Chance

02 February 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The image in the middle came about when I was making the image on the left. The one on the left is the backside of the plexiglass; it’s what shows through after applying frontside brushstrokes. In ways I only now understand, the middle one is more interesting. But that version is now gone. The way I work, it was never intended to be seen. It was always intended to be sandwiched between the backside of the plexiglass and the original paint skin that I will adhere to the frontside (which is the one on the right). It was nothing but something that appeared in the middle process of creating a double-sided painting.

When I finish and you are holding the painting in your hand, you will see the right-side version on the surface, and when you turn it around, you’ll see the left-side coming through the transparent plexiglass. But the center version you will only ever see in this photo, and it makes me want to go and make a dozen of them on frontside-intended paint skins so that I can also have it. Why a dozen, one might ask. A dozen is the minimum! I would need to make a dozen because I would need to recreate it under the auspices of spontaneity; this type of painting only works if it were tossed off, and a dozen attempts might give me the desired look one of those times. And it might not. Because spontaneity is more like throwing dice than deliberately moving pieces.

Another way to look at this is that the one-of-a-kind look has already happened, and it is now buried under another image, with no hope of ever coming back — but I’m going to try it anyway. Because that is what I do, follow the path of most resistance.

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REMINISCING: THE OTHER SIDE

07 June 2017 by Rey Armenteros

Looking at old paintings and old drawings is a bitter-sweet pastime. On the one side, you’re reminiscing. In reliving the past, you enter the warm world of nostalgia. But on the other, those old works that once appeared so successful are successful no longer – or at least, not for the same reasons. This is actually the good news. Far worse is when the painting has something that was better than you remember it, making you feel good for a second (the sweet component to this subjective reality) but simultaneously making you question why you no longer paint in such a dynamic and charming way (the bitter).

There are “mistakes” I would gladly make today, if they could only look as good as the ones you are now beholding from some years back, old mishaps that seem to hit just the one right note today.

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REMINISCING: THE ONE SIDE

26 May 2017 by Rey Armenteros

It is only natural to look back at old art and find it subpar, but what happens when you conclude that it was better than you remember it? What happens when you look back at old artwork and find it in your honest assessments that you had deviated from something that was actually better?

When it happens to me, I wonder if I still have it in me on some one or two levels, if I can no longer draw that hand the way I thought I could, if my eye for color is softening. I wonder if I took the wrong turn back seven years ago, and it is now coming to haunt me. I hate feeling regret, but moments like these, it is unavoidable.

This sound like a warning, but I do feel old art should always be revisited, because it contains reminders of paths you had intended but left behind. When I look at these old images from Shinchon, Korea, I find a freshness and boldness that I have put up on the shelf as my art developed with the years. Reminders of freshness are beneficial later, when that is a trait you don’t even recognize you’re missing.

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REMINISCING: THE DISTANCE

15 May 2017 by Rey Armenteros

It was one of those garage moments wherein I was cracking open old boxes and dodging the welling dust to get at old memories. No matter how you cut it, looking at old artwork is asking for trouble. The excitement that comes with the curiosity, for me, usually mingles with confusion.

Here is one take on that confusion. It is rare when you look at the old drawings that you find exactly what you remembered. You are either going to wonder why you thought that drawing that was so good was good at all, or you’re going to look at certain mediocre pieces that actually had promise if not a certain something that “those old good ones” lacked.

This is good, you tell yourself, because this is the clarity of distance (the distance of time) making you see what should have been obvious. This is the same perspective you exercise when you put aside a painting for a couple of weeks and get enough distance to see it from a more objective position. You tell yourself this, and you uphold this fickle assessment as something inestimable.

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When Style Fails to Make an Appearance

30 April 2017 by Rey Armenteros

When making art, we seldom think about the things that drive us to make the work in the first place. It is something I have noted over the years. Some artists are trying to get their ideas out, putting together things that they would like to see come to life, like large projects that take whatever it takes to make it happen. Others are devoted to a process, the repetition of certain rituals, the likelihood of saying the same things over and over, and I am thinking of painters that paint the same things with little variation. And others are driven by experimentation and what results you could get when you put these several things together in this new or peculiar way.

Related to experimentation is the dynamic of performing a feat, which brings in a win or lose dynamic. If the results don’t work the way you had hypothesized, it may have proved to be a waste of time. This means your performance has a chance of not obtaining satisfactory results, and maybe this is the one drive that encapsulates them all because anything could happen.

I don’t know; these are just words, and without going into extensive detail they might fail in capturing the subtle shifts in the way we go about work.

When I was making my paintings for Memories from a Radio, you could say that I was using every drive I could, and the results were a miscellany of different outcomes and styles. One drawback to being so eclectic with your art approach is that the viewer might not recognize a style. Since their may be few patterns in your work, it will appear to lack cohesion.

When things got sporadic in Memories from a Radio, the only connection I had to avoid a disjointed body of work was the Tarot card iconography of frames and symbols, and I could never be sure to what degree this was able to tie everything together.

In a sense, I was pursuing a feat whose results were variegated because it depends on the perspective of each viewer. Even with the Tarot motif, I still had viewers approach me at shows asking why it was I would diverge so dramatically between paintings.

And as much as this sounds like a cop out, I never had a clear answer for such questions.

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The Generation of an Image

19 July 2016 by Rey Armenteros

Here we have textbook steps for a painting; this is textbook in the traditional sense, which is something that rarely happens in my work.

This began with a rudimentary drawing.

The drawing developed a bit more before going into color.

In this case, before introducing the colors, I placed more gesso over the drawing to allow for later transparent washes of color.

Textures were added for still more washes of color.

With a return to drawing, I further cut into the forms, refining them a bit by using lines. There were no opaque painting in this one.

This image, like all my images, is from memory. It was done with the Great Kamakura Buddha in mind, which I had seen twice when I lived in Japan. I did it in 2012, and looking at it now, I clearly see where this falls short (on all manner of levels, including the fact that it has only some remote resemblance to the real one). I will say that I did have a slightly different way of entering paintings in those days (notwithstanding these steps), and it was more of a purist, hit or miss approach, where in this case, I got the essence (or structure) without getting the details, without really getting the subtlety. I may explain this better one day.

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Pure Memory

08 January 2016 by Rey Armenteros

This is from pure memory, but what does that mean? To me, it could be something as simple as I got this out of my head. But since this is the way I always work, I know there are facets to it most of us take for granted. For example: This is a general memory from my dad’s living room, and there was no doubt a lamp where you see it, but if that lamp looked exactly like that one you see in the picture is highly doubtful. I had to make it up in most places because I simply do not recall. His face, on the other hand, is from whatever I could bring back from direct memory, which is also spotty. There are also points where this picture has taken embellishments because there comes a point to most paintings and drawings where you try to make it clearer or closer to the goal you set out for it.

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