Issue date: 3/26/08 Section: ARTS & LIFE

Media Credit: Chase Martinez Dallas senior Arthur Pena gives his best impersonation of Jackson Pollock's pose during the opening of his art show at the Union Gallery Tuesday night.

Ever since Arthur Peña was 12 years old, he has dreamed that he was being chased by tornadoes.

The subject of his longtime dreams has become the subject of his latest paintings- an abstract collection designed to make the viewer feel uncomfortable.

"The tornadoes in my dreams represented my problems," Peña said. "They were tensions within myself that I used to create visual discomfort."

Peña, a senior and native of Dallas' Oak Cliff neighborhood, uses spray paint as his primary medium, but it's difficult to tell at first glance. Then again, one may not be able to tell what his creations are, let alone what they are made of.

Peña creates shapes- thick blocks of color with edges so precise people could swear it was acrylic- and layers them over one another, mingling them with patches of stripes. The stripes are remnants carried over from his earlier paintings. Now he uses them to represent anxiety.

"Not too many students use spray paint as their primary medium," said Matt Bourbon of the College of Visual Arts and Design. "They may have a love of graffiti art and will use spray paint, but he has the ability to transform it and have it not be just what you'd think graffiti art would be."

Peña said painting, for him, is a vicious cycle. The anxiety he paints is conjured from the anxiety he experiences spending hours in the studio trying to get the image in his mind to the canvas.

"Painting produces images, the images produce anxiety and the anxiety inspires more painting," he said.

Bourbon said Peña is part of a core group of students who spend hours in the studio and are completely dedicated to their work.

"He is one of our strong undergraduate students," Bourbon said.

The first piece that can be seen hanging on the walls of the Union Gallery is a grid of tiny beds with pieces of paper attached to each pillow, bearing words like "mistakes" and "uncertainty."

The beds, on the most literal level, are reminders of Peña's recurring dream. On a more figurative level, they are signs of comfort, and the words on the pillows mix the unsettling with the inviting.

Continued...

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