The Painted Photograph Exhibit Ends Sat Feb 16; Photo Book Coming Soon!

Happy Monday everyone!

Believe it or not, this Saturday, Feb 16th, is the final day of The Painted Photograph exhibit! The time flew by so fast, and in just over a week, it will be time to say ‘goodbye’ to some of my babies as they will soon go to their new homes!

In case you haven’t had a chance to get over to the Center to see the show in person, the gallery is open every day this week, with the following hours:

  • Monday thru Wednesday, 10 am to 5 pm
  • Thursday, 10 am to 9:30 pm
  • Friday and Saturday, 12 pm to 5 pm

Please don’t forget to sign the guest book when you go!

Even though the show is ending, my residency continues til the end of this month. I hope to make a little more new work between now and then, use up the last of my supplies, and prepare a print for the upcoming Members Show.

And, I have some other exciting news: I put together a commemorative photo book using Blurb!

book cover
The Painted Photograph book cover

I wanted the book to represent the work as realistically as possible, so it will be large, size 12 inches x 12 inches, which allows for almost full-size reproductions of each image.

It will have a black-linen hard cover with a printed dust jacket featuring my water-colored ‘Squash Blossom’ image. And I went with online recommendations and selected the heavier-weight, premium pearl paper, which supposedly represents both black and white and color photographs best.

page sample2
Couple pages from the Winter Series section of the book

During my research to learn what makes an ‘interesting’ book of photographs, I found that for the most dramatic effect, each image should be alone on its page.  So, I ended up with a total of 34 pages, one for each of the 25 images in the exhibit, plus a couple for my Artist Statement, and an index of all the images with titles and details, including the locations where each photo was originally taken. There’s no text on the photo pages except for a number representing that image in the index.

page sample1
Couple pages from the Vegetation Series section of the book

My plan is to offer these for sale (all signed, of course!), though I’m not sure what the price will be yet. A ‘proof’ copy is expected to arrive after the show has ended, around Feb 25, which means additional copies will  be available some time in March.

If you are interested in having a copy for yourself, you can leave a comment here, email me at jjperena@gmail.com, or contact Megan Charland in the Photo Dept office at 585-271-5920. We’ll be in touch as soon as we settle on the price and availability.

Til that comes in, I hope to be around the Photo Dept a lot this week, and will be in the gallery all day on Saturday meeting and greeting visitors. Then on Monday, Feb 18, we will take the show down.

Hope you all have a great week, and that if you stop over on Saturday we get a chance to chat!

 

Jen Perena’s Artist Talk and Kallitype Process Demo

Happy Monday everyone!

Here we are, the final Monday of the month of January, and I don’t know about you, but to me it REALLY feels like time is flying! On this past Saturday (Jan 26) I completed another goal of my Artist Residency, when I delivered my Artist Talk and followed that with a demonstration of the Kallitype Photo Process. We had a really great turn out for both events, and though it was a long day, I am super happy with all the positive response. And the applause. Applause is always good!

The talk was scheduled to begin at 2 pm, but we started a few minutes late while we waited for everyone to get seated, and then I pretty much went non-stop for 45 min. I could just imagine friends saying ‘Jen, take a breath!’, but I was a little too excited and just got carried away!

In theory, the talk was divided into sections: an introduction (who is Jen Perena?), details about my residency, the inspiration behind my exhibit, and info about the kallitype process.

Talking to the full room
Talking to the full room – I had Powerpoint slides….but didn’t really follow them (Photo by Gerry Szymanski)

I prepared a Powerpoint of approximately 20 slides to support the sections, but didn’t really follow it; this happens when I am over prepared – I have the slides and content memorized, but not the actual script of the presentation. And I personally find presentations that follow the slides bullet-by-bullet to be pretty dull, so I did my best to weave a story. At times I felt like I was rambling, but I recorded the whole thing on my iPad, and after watching it back later, I was OK with it. Everything that I wanted to cover was covered, and there were some great questions at the end.

If you are interested to watch/listen, the 56-minute video (talk + Q&A) has been uploaded to Youtube. You can’t see the audience or the slide presentation, but my hand gestures and facial expressions should keep you entertained!!

Click here for my Artist Talk Video on Youtube

Talking to the full room
Talking to the full room – guessing we had around 30-40 people? (Photo by Megan Charland)

After the talk we had roughly 35 minutes for mingling where I got to greet folks who had missed the opening. Lots of very special visitors, including my former art teacher from Wheatland-Chili Central School, who was the person that first introduced me to developing film and making black-and-white prints in the teeny-tiny, closet-like darkroom in our high school. I was thrilled she was able to see the show, and also pleasantly surprised to hear that they STILL have a darkroom (!), and that photography is still part of the art curriculum there! I will have to make a date to get over there and visit.

Also, in case folks were interested, I had brought samples of some of my other alternative-process work (palladium prints, wet plate collodion glass positives, tin types and salt prints), plus a pile of ‘rejected’ kallitypes, and a couple of the leather-bound photo albums that my grandfather had put together which had impacted and influenced me as a child (referenced in my Artist Statement in the previous blog article). Attendees were free to review all of that while others took in the exhibit. I sold two more pieces, plus one of my reject prints, and then it was time for the demo!

Kallitype Process Demo
Kallitype Process Demo – explaining about the chemistry, paper and brushes (Photo by Megan Charland)

About 12 folks were patient enough to wait for me to wrap up the talk and start the demo.  I had gone in early to set everything up, so just needed to transition out of my ‘narrative mode’ and more into a ‘teaching mode’. I started by describing the water color paper and brush I was using, the chemicals we use (silver nitrate and ferric oxalate), the option to add a contrast booster (not needed for this demo), and then dove into the process: first, coat and dry the paper, then expose the print, then develop-tone-and-fix.

It was interactive, but also a little more challenging than I expected because I usually make my work without other people around, and once you start talking, and they ask questions which you answer, you kind of get distracted. What was I just doing? Is the paper dry enough? How long did I set the timer for? You get the picture. In any event, I lucked out and the print worked!

Kallitype Demo
Kallitype Demo – coating paper for print #2 with my little cousin (Photo by Ronnie Skwieralski)

After putting the first print on the drying rack, most of the attendees left, but my cousins had arrived about part way through the process of print #1, so I offered to do another one. I explained the whole process to my 5-year-old cousin while her dad took pictures of us.  Hopefully she thought it was neat.

Anyway, I have to thank a few folks for their help with the talk. Thank you Mark and Liz for setting up the Sunken Room; Thank you Megan for the help with the projector and for taking photos; Thank you Susan for another beautiful flower display; and Thank you to everyone who came and listened, took photos of the events, left me some comments in the guest book, and especially those of you who purchased a print, and in doing so, are supporting the Photo Dept. I am really, really grateful for all the love!

And now, finally, my Residency is nearing it’s end. I’ll continue to make work for the month of Feb, and will probably have at least one or two more blog articles showing you what else I’m up to. Til then, I hope you are all staying warm this week!

The Painted Photograph: Gallery and Artist Statement

Happy Monday everyone,

Jen Perena here with a quick post so that those of you who missed the opening, can’t get in to the gallery or are far away can see all the images in the exhibit.

There are a total of 24 matted and framed images divided into two series: the “Winter Series”, focusing mostly on snow and winter scenes, and the “Vegetation Series”, focusing mostly on veggies, cacti and other forms of vegetation.

I’ve marked the ones that have already sold, so just in case you want to buy from afar you know what is still available!

All prints are roughly 8x 10 (or 10×8, depending on orientation), and are matted and framed to size 16×20. Frames are the standard matte-black, metal Nielsen frames, with glass.

Right now you can only see the thumbs (clicking on an image will not make it bigger), but I am hoping to create an online gallery where you can see the work in more detail – stay tuned for a future blog post about that!

winter series for blog

Everything in the Winter Series (above) is selenium toned, and all prints are $250 framed, and $200 matted only.

Everything in the Vegetation Series (below) is selenium toned and then hand-water colored over the top. All prints are $300 framed and $250 matted only.

veg series for blog-updated

If you are interested in making a purchase, contact Megan Charland in the Photo Department office at 585-271-5920.

Here also is my Artist Statement, where you can learn more about my residency, my motivations and the work:

I grew up looking at, taking and appreciating photographs. My maternal grandfather was an ‘early adopter’ of photographic technology and took a camera with him around the world during his time in the Navy in the 1940s, filling numerous scrapbooks with ‘slice of life’ photos from on board his ships, and from his interactions with local people in the various countries where he was posted. I remember constantly looking through his large, leather-bound photo albums as a young child, fascinated by the very small, contrasty black and white prints with white borders and wavy edges.

I’ve been drawn to black and white as my preferred medium since that time, but after numerous classes and darkroom sessions, was not satisfied with the end results or the process. I was shooting film, making work and exhibiting it annually in shows at the Community Darkroom galleries, but after the shows would end the photos would go in a box never to be seen again.

About 15 years ago this changed when I took a Holga Camera class taught by Patrick Cain. I immediately loved the plastic camera with its quirks and light leaks, and the idea that each roll of film would be a crap shoot of whether anything would turn out. This was a bit more interesting to me because of the random chance that no matter what you did, a light leak or internal issue could impact the film. Then when you finally saw the film, you had to work harder to make something from the negatives.

Fast forward a few more years, and I began taking alternative and historic photo process classes, also at the Darkroom. Over a period of approximately 5 years, I tried everything offered: tin types, albumin prints, ambrotypes, cyanotypes, salt prints, wet-plate collodion, etc. Altogether, the classes were like a succession of ‘eureka moments’ for me – introducing numerous steps into the process of making a print, each one with a potentially different outcome, even though you essentially did the same thing. The quality of the original negative (composition aside) stopped really mattering when you were battling your own diligence preparing paper, tin or glass plates, as well as humidity and the age of the chemistry. And for me, this process became sort of addicting.

I finally settled on the process I like best: contact printing – when I took a platinum and palladium printing class. Using my Holga negatives, I made dozens of small, contrasty black and white prints – reminiscent of the ones I had loved in my grandfather’s albums – except the wavy white borders of his paper prints were replaced by the thick black borders made by brushstrokes as I painted chemistry onto different papers to make my work. Each finished print was precious, but the cost of the chemistry was high, and I didn’t feel confident to make work outside of a class.

Then I took a kallitype class with Jon Merritt and the final puzzle piece fell into place for me. Kallitypes are very similar to palladium prints, but with slightly different and more affordable chemistry, allowing for larger-size prints. After taking the class a couple times, I realized this was finally a process I could master and practice solo. Since then (roughly the last 3 years), I have been primarily focusing on making kallitypes.

The kallitype process I learned combines digital work with alternative process. I start with iPhone images which are then manipulated in Photoshop to create interesting black and whites with a specific curve for the kallitype process. The resulting digital negative is printed onto Pictorico plastic and then used for contact printing. The chemistry (silver nitrate and ferric oxalate) is hand mixed and manually applied to watercolor paper, then the paper is force dried using a hair dryer. I place the plastic negative on top of the dried photo-sensitive watercolor paper and expose it in a light box, and then the prints are developed, washed, toned and fixed in numerous baths. Each print is a labor of love and no two are alike. And I love that.

For this exhibit, I explored two themes. The first is about snow and winter. The 12 prints are all selenium-toned kallitypes, featuring snow in unexpected forms, to make the viewer look twice. While some of the compositions are more accessible and traditional in terms of the viewer’s ability to understand exactly what they are looking at (i.e. a pine branch covered in snow), others focus more on the angle, texture, light and frame, so the viewer may have to use some imagination. Or at least view all the images in total in order to better understand the few that are more abstract.

The second theme is about hand coloring. For these the subject matter varies from vegetables and flowers to cacti and other forms of vegetation. This set of 12 also started as toned, black and white kallitypes, but I then watercolored them. Some are more subtle, some more vivid. This part of the project was motivated by my love of real-life color, and by the endless tones, textures, shapes, depths, etc. of organic matter.

The entire body of work wraps up a 6-month residency here at the Photography Department, and is dedicated to the memory of my late father, also a photographer, who taught me to cook and to ski, and who instilled in me my love of vegetables and appreciation for winter and snow.