An All Inclusive Presence

Fernando has completed a clam-shell box portfolio, An All Inclusive Presence, that contains an essay and a selection of 60 (13 x 19") prints from the series of Sumi ink paintings on glass that he has been working on since 2004. This portfolio is intended as both a book prototype and the proposal for an exhibit in which the prints could be seen at their ideal scale (around 40 x 60").

The following text describes the process of the sumi ink painting on glass and the motivation behind the work. For more examples of the images created, visit the website Unbound Art

Let me first give you some idea of the process that leads to these prints.

First, a very rough sketch of the human form or a landscape is made by painting with water on 6 x 8” or 8 x 10” glass plate. Then, this hardly visible and very basic form is tinted with highly and differentially diluted acrylic pigment or sumi ink.

Subsequently, a heat gun (an industrial strength hair dryer) is used to raise the temperature of this mixture and to gently push it around. Brushes and other tools are also utilized throughout the process.

This manner of painting creates a very thin emulsion of paint that is to a great extent the actual record of tinted fluids rolling across the flat, nonabsorbent surface of a sheet of glass.

The plates that survive inspection are cleaned, protected with an acrylic fixative (the painted surface is extremely fragile) and then either used as large format negatives to create silver gelatin photographic (black and white) contact prints made by exposing photographic paper placed directly under the glass plate serving as negative; or, more commonly, they are scanned at high resolution, further processed in the computer and then printed, either as color photographs or as inkjet prints.(The ink emulsion is read as rich and varied chocolaty, sepia or golden tones in the scanning process).

The very nature of the the elements and processes from which these rather complex images emerge is intended to draw attention to the fundamental physical and psychological similarity of all human beings. There is no form in the inherent transparency of water—no-thing—and there is no form in ink—total darkness, no-thing as well. Form emerges as wind and heat animate unthinkable steps in a flowing dance of nothing with nothing.

Awareness of the fundamental commonality of all human beings, challenges our irrational proclivity to exaggerate the presumed uniqueness and pedigree of our particular identities. Unless the overwrought value we each attribute to our relatively different experience, knowledge, belief and desires,is radically cut back, we will never have the sanity without which harmony in our relationships and peace in the world are but a chimera.

Throughout the ages, we have been persistently told by spiritual masters that beyond our obvious perceptive and cognitive limitations and beneath the superficial differences of our inherently antagonistic psychological and tribal identities, there is a formless and therefore indivisible—yet infinitely lively and creative—state of being (An All-Inclusive Presence) in which mental suffering as a result of conflicted and conflictive separation, cannot possibly exist.

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