Below is Lovetts Gallery's recent and very revealing interview with artist, printmaker, and educator, the multi-talented Alex J. Peña. Alex discusses his artistic background and impetus, challenges encountered as a printmaker in a world dominated by "traditional" artists, and his particular brand of requisite neurosis! Enjoy!
What is your educational background and interest in the arts?
I went to undergraduate school in Lawton, OK at Cameron University. When I first started, I decided was I going to try out the double major challenge. I was very interested in science and in medicine, either Osteopathic Medicine or Chiropractic. However, I enrolled full-time in the Fine Arts Program and really fell in love with naturalistic drawing. For my first year in undergrad, I still took the science courses, but I really focused on honing my drawing and perceptual skills and thus I was able to draw quite well. After my freshman year, I decided to pursue only Fine Art. I graduated from Cameron University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Magna cum laude, with an Emphasis on Printmaking in 2006.
I was accepted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate Program in Fine Art. I was offered a very generous fellowship and I accepted and began studying there in 2006. I graduated from the program in 2009. UW-Madison is ranked the number one school in the nation for Printmaking. Therefore, I had the great privilege to work with professors who are considered masters and pioneers in their fields. They were excellent mentors and their approach to teaching helped me to expand my experience and success.
During my Graduate studies, I also had the opportunity to work at Tandem Press for three years. Tandem Press is a fine-art Printmaking studio, where “Blue Chip” artists come and create prints with the help of the expertise of the master printers. During my time there, I got to work with several inspiring artists, including Judy Pfaff, Robert Cottingham, and Joan Snyder. In addition, the master printers taught me how to print in a level of professional technique and finesse that is required in a Fine-Art Print Studio.
So, you are a printmaker. What does that mean?
One of my professors at UW-Madison said that, “Printmakers are considered the second-class citizens of the art world.” I fully agree. When people ask me what I do for work, I say that I am an artist. Then the inevitable list of questions that every artist must answer begins. “What type of art? Is it Abstract? Are you a painter? What type of pictures do you like to draw?” They are legitimate questions, but become harder and more frustrating to answer as time goes by. I am a Printmaker, but I rather label myself as an Artist first, but one who chooses to use printmaking as my main medium.
Printmaking is actually defined as the fine art of making multiple originals. Huh? It sounds more legit than I make prints, doesn’t it? When I mention the word print, most think I am talking about printing posters in the commercial high-tech digital or offset ways. Or they think I screenprint t-shirts. Just like painting, drawing, etc. have a certain aesthetic, so does the many media within Printmaking. Printmaking includes woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, screenprinting, etc. Each has their unique visual aesthetic that you can only achieve through knowing the processes, history, and variety within. For example, I specialize in Etching and Lithography. The following is just a condensed explanation of Etching. Etching is done on a metal plate, usually copper or zinc. The artist applies an acid-resist ground to the plate and then is able to manipulate the ground by removing it by scratching it, rubbing it, or by other means, and whatever area on the metal plate that is exposed by the artist’s manipulation will be etched permanently into the metal by biting it in an acid bath. After the acid eats away the metal, the 
artist then washes the ground off and the image is created by filling any etched areas with ink and printing the inked metal plate on paper by using a press that exerts enough pressure to transfer the ink to the paper. You have created an original print, yet the matrix, or the etched metal plate still exists leaving the artist the option to repeat the process of inking the plate and printing it however many times the artist wants or the plate will withstand. The artist has created an edition (a series of exactly the same image) with each print considered an original.
As I opened, artists even consider us second-class for a reason I do not understand. Printmakers have extensive knowledge in their field and techniques just as a painter, sculptor, jeweler, etc. has. Maybe they haven’t realized that each print is considered an original multiple (no offense to you painters, sculptors, jewelers, etc.)
Why did you pursue printmaking vs. more traditional paths in studio art (i.e. painting, ceramics, etc.)?
Printmaking is just as traditional as painting, ceramics, etc. In fact, some of the most ancient artwork, such as the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, are not paintings at all, but are prints. The artist would use his/her hands as a stencil or matrix (printmaking terms) and spit pigment through a reed on top of his/her hands (the matrix) and would repeat that process, thus creating impressions or original multiples. Traditional is a relative term, as the practice of printmaking dates back for millenniums.
Just about every mainstream artist or sculptor has made prints and loves them just as much as their paintings. Again, printmaking is my chosen medium for expression and a foundation for thinking and approaching all my art, prints or not.
What do you hope happens when a person views your work for the first time/every time?
I want the viewer to see the work as I do. I don’t want them to completely understand why I did everything. However, I want them to look holistically at my work and see a sense of refined and purposeful beauty. I consider my work somewhat minimal, at the least subtle, but I have incorporated certain nuance into every piece and that is what I want to sustain the viewers’ interest and further investigation.
Viewers can't help compare your your work to more familiar art forms, such as oil on canvas. What is your response to that constant comparison?
Hopefully through my previous comments, I have educated readers in a sufficient way to defend all art, in any medium, including printmaking. To me, the question is similar to why did a painter use oil, or acrylic, or encaustic? Or a sculptor, why clay, stone, metal? As an artist, I make the decision to use the medium that I feel best suits my concept, just like a painter chooses oil. The hierarchy shouldn’t be based on medium, just quality.
So, in addition to creating work for your galleries, you are now teaching. Tell us more about that.
Currently I am an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. I teach 2-dimensional fundamentals and Intermediate and Advanced Printmaking. I have always loved to teach. I love the mediums I work with and I love helping students understand how to use those mediums in an educated yet creative way.
I enjoy helping students “discover” new artists they have never heard of before or showing them a new technique that thrills them. It’s satisfying when students come up and thank me for helping them see a different mode of working or a new technique they never knew existed.
You have branched out from more strict forms of printmaking, including painting on your works? Can you expound on this evolution?
Take Pablo Picasso as an example. He is best known as a painter, yet he was a sculptor, ceramist, and a prolific printmaker, yet I don’t ever think he thought of himself as a strict painter. Over the length of my experience in the arts, I have “branched out” to include other mediums such as painting and drawing incorporated with prints. I am not a total purist when it comes to printmaking. I love printmaking and for some of my ideas, they can only be communicated through the “strict” methods of printmaking. Now, I have evolved to where I find the specific medium that best fits my idea and aesthetic even in a multi-media composition. Now you find I have drawings that include etching, graphite, paint, charcoal, metallic ink pens, hand-made paper, etc. I don’t limit myself to just one medium.
What drives you to continue producing works of art?
The critics hate the word beauty. I love beauty. I continue to make art because I find beauty in things that inspire me even if it’s a dead twig, there’s beauty in my thinking process, my actual method of composing a drawing or print, the physicality of painting, drawing, or pulling a print, and finally the beauty of the final product. I am not using beauty in a way to escape a definite concept behind my work or in a sense of self-flattery. There is always something I am thinking about and I am thinking about how I am going to communicate it best and beauty is one of the ways in which I can communicate.
I find when I am not making art on a continuous basis, I become more emotionally and mentally unstable (I’m not talking schizophrenic or manic.) As with all artists, they have an innate need to continue to create. I really think everyone, “artist” or not needs to have an outlet of production be it cooking, writing a letter, telling a story… I have a constant need to see and feel something new that I have created to feel a sense of accomplishment, and in turn that gives me the impetus to always have that need.
Where would you like to see career in 5 years? 10 years?
I would like to have as broad of an audience as possible. I’m not speaking exclusively in terms of selling, but to have many viewers around the country and possibly the world. I hope that my “career” in art would create a desire for viewers across the country and the world to want to be viewers of my work.
What is the most defining or significant happening in your career as an artist?
I haven’t identified one yet, but when I can, Lovett’s Gallery will be the first to know.
Printmaking is a meticulous technical process, which, at times, suggests a bit of neurotic personality in the artist. Tell us if this holds true for you and, if so, how?
“Neurotic?!” Of course that’s a part of my personality.
Printmaking is meticulous, time-consuming, and requires a diverse yet specialized, even scientific knowledge of the printmaking methods. However, my neurosis comes from my own expectations of the unattainable; perfection. My parents say that since I was a child, I was a perfectionist. I remember an instance that validates this. I may have been four years old or younger, but I remember playing outside and my jeans got grass stains on the knees. I was furious! I went inside and asked my mom if the stains would come out. She said probably not. At that point, I said I was never going to play outside because my jeans would be ruined forever. So I hope that anecdote helps to explain my neurosis. Printmaking just added to my perfectionist idealization.
Feel free to tell us anything additional that you think your collectors, viewers, and critics would like I hope that anyone who sees my art appreciates the variety.
The saying “A Jack of all trades, but a master of none,” isn’t appropriate to the variety within my work. Artists have the freedom, or at least I have given myself the freedom, to be self-indulgent and to create a variety of art without feeling aimless, unprofessional, or even apologetic.
I hope this variety gives my viewers, collectors, and critics an insight into my thinking process and my art practice.
