Interview with John Peña

In this very first episode for the very first Pittsburgh Indie Expo, organizer Harry Amplas interviews John Peña about sending letters to the ocean and making yourself draw everyday. Below is a transcription, edited for clarity.

Harry: So your work has origins in your fascination with geology. What life experiences led to your decision to harness that fascination into your art?

John: That's a great question. I’m originally from Washington State and where we grew up there’s a vast kind of desert, high plains, desert landscape. So I was always really fascinated by the surroundings of that area. My parents grew up working in the fields because it's like irrigated crop land there, everything from apples to nectarines to asparagus to hops. So I just took in the environment a whole lot.

Then when I was in college, I took an introductory course to geology. I was really blown away by it as a science and the idea of these slow gradual actions, like erosion, happening over millions and millions of years, having the capacity to shape these kinds of monumental structures that are imperceptible on the daily level. And I think that that impacted me early on without even realizing it. I found myself kind of adopting an artistic practice that modeled itself after geological processes.

I thought to myself, what would happen if I treated myself as part of this, natural force? So what daily actions could I do that would, over time, accumulate and build into some larger shape? And so that's when I first started sending a letter to the Pacific Ocean, which I did every day for 12 years.

That project was largely about the process, [the journey the] letter went on, and then the return of the letter and all the interactions along that. But I found myself journaling a lot in those letters. And I think later in the years, I found myself drawing more and more, and I was like, oh, I think there's something different emerging here. And that's where they divided. I stopped doing letters to the ocean and started making Daily Geology, which is a drawing project where every day for the last 15 years I've made a drawing about my day.

For me, I'm interested in modeling those natural systems as a way of both creating a sustainable art practice, but also making something that on the daily level you can't see what's emerging. It's only over months and years that things begin to take shape.

Harry: So have you found that you need a certain level of discipline to keep making a drawing every single day?

John: Sure, yeah, but I don't know if it's any different [from the] discipline in going to work or brushing your teeth every day. I think it's like, you know, if you can navigate brushing your teeth every day, you can make a drawing every day. It doesn't have to be a good drawing. I always tell people that when they’re like, how do you make a drawing every day? I'm like, it doesn't have to be good. I never said it was good. So you can make a ton of crap and it's okay because it's all part of the process, you know?

Harry: Absolutely. So what would you say is the biggest challenge that you faced on your path to establishing yourself as an artist?

John: Biggest challenge, I think, is primarily financial because it's economics, right? Just being an artist is very difficult. I mean just living, just surviving is very difficult, so being an artist is pretty challenging. Yeah, I think that's the one that's been the hardest for me. The creativity and the discipline, those kind of things come in time and with attention and deliberate action and discovery. But I think just figuring out how to navigate being able to support myself, my family, help out where I can, has been one of the hardest things constantly balancing that.

I meet younger artists who perceive me as, like, having “made it” in some way. Like, people recognize his name and he does his projects. And I'm like, no, I'm really close to you. Like, we're right next to each other. The only thing I have on you is I've been doing it a little longer! But in terms of, like, you know, paying the bills, it's like still working different jobs, putting things together, work, art things when I can do other freelance things when I can, you know, putting it together to take care of things and, also be able to give myself enough time to be making work to write.

Harry: So what are the origins of your relationship with the city of Pittsburgh? And how has working closely with the local communities influenced your approach to your work?

John: Oh, wow, yeah,  that's been pretty transitional or like pretty huge in a, like, in a transitional way. Well, I originally came here for school in 2002 or in 2005. At the time, I came [to] Carnegie Mellon because they had a strong kind of public art program. At the time, I think they called it…I think the terminology now would be like “socially engaged social practice.” Those are kind of the contemporary terminologies, but it was something similar to that. And that was really good because I got to experiment and learn a lot and read a lot, and do different projects during my time. And then I left Pittsburgh for a couple of years to do some projects, thenI ended up coming back here, I think, in 2011 and started working with some artists.

That was pretty influential but I think one of the biggest impacts came when I did the Larimer Stories project in 2018. They did an open call for artists wanting to work in public contexts. I interviewed and here's the gist of it – at the time, it was a collaboration between Shift Work's public community and public art and neighborhood allies.

The idea was they wanted to pick artists to work in these particular neighborhoods that they had partnerships with. [These artists] would create new works of temporary public art. So kind of contrary to the idea of like an artist being hired in to make whatever you want and you plop it down, right? Or like you make or you have a preconceived idea of what you're going to do, and then you make it. This was like, we don't want any preconceptions. We want you very much to collaborate. And so that was pretty great.

I interacted and interviewed with the Larimer Consensus Group, at the time Stanley Holbrook was the chair, now it's Donna Jackson. We interviewed really well and we had a lot of similar interests and overlap. And so working with the larger group, the first idea was that I wanted to get to know more about the neighborhood. So I proposed doing interviews where I pay people $25 for a half hour interview, just talking about their experiences living in the neighborhood, growing up in the neighborhood, moving to the neighborhood.

I found myself interviewing senior citizens the most. I would re-interview over and over because they were such a wealth of information. So then I talked to Donna at the time and said, hey, can we do like a senior luncheon where every month we get together and we talk about potentially collaborating on a project and sharing stories, and she was really excited. She had already been doing something kind of informally. So we put it together, and it was great to have all the seniors together and learn about each other.

That's how we ended up doing the sign project where we shared stories there on 200 Larimer Drive, at a busy intersection on a sign where it changed out every two weeks to share stories from the oldest residents in the neighborhood.

With that, I became friends with the oldest resident at the time when I met him, who was 97, Mister Tony [aka] Mr. Anthony Manero. We became friends pretty quickly over shared interests of working in the yard and going to Aldi and getting groceries. We just became friends, and that was really great making that connection. Through working and building trust with this group of senior citizens in the neighborhood, we decided to keep working together. We've been working together since then, and we still have our monthly luncheons.

Harry: Yeah, and Mr. Tony became a huge part of your project, Daily Geology. He has three whole books in his name! 

John: Yeah, and a fourth one coming out for PIE!

Harry: Oh, that's awesome! So what have you learned from your friendship with Mr. Tony and how has he inspired you?

John: I mean, he's been huge. There's a section in the book I made where it talks about how my wife pointed out that our yard looks a lot nicer ever since I met Tony. And I think it was because when I'm hanging out with him, we work on pruning some bushes and we work on his yard. And then I'd be like, oh, I should work on my yard! It's not that we left it neglected.

It's just that working with Tony made me realize how much I like doing it and also how much I like shaping things. [...] I'm a sculptor, too. And I think he would have been a sculptor, no problem. He very much had that inclination toward of shaping objects and stuff like that. He very much was a sculptor, in that way, you know, and his work was very public in that it was on the intersection of [...] his neighborhood.

So I think that was a big thing. I think more than anything, I was always stuck in my head. Or I was worried about something and I was distracted, and I stopped by [Mister Tony] and seeing him immediately brought me into the present moment because we'd had something to do. We were working in the yard. We were talking about history. We were doing something, and he'd always kind of pull me into myself in the moment in a relational engagement with the world. And I think that that's huge because it's really easy for me to live in a non-relational engagement with the world or in a social media engagement with the world, or in a I just have to get from point A to point B and not do anything in between, right?

Like go to the bank, go to the post office, I'm just going to get it done as quickly as possible. But Tony, I think, was a good influence because he would force me [to slow down] without even realizing it. When I'm at the at the post office, to be like looking at people, studying things, listening, you know, talking to people, holding the door open for people, just the mundane minutiae of everyday life that contributes to quality of life for everybody. I think was a big influence.

Harry: So in addition to being a special guest at PIE this year, you're an advisor as well. How has your participation in Pittsburgh's local art community led to your participation at PIE?

John: Well, I think everybody organizing PIE, has just done incredible things for the comics community. From the drawing board to zine fair. Everybody's been killing it over there in a really great way. So when they asked me I was like, oh yeah, definitely, sign me up, I'll help however I can. You know, I don't even think I heard what they needed me for, I just said, sign me up. I feel I'm in a lot of different worlds, right? I'm in the public art world, comics world, drawing in a kind of more traditional gallery exhibition space. And I kind of overlap a lot of these different worlds, and I feel like, yeah, whatever. However I'm able to contribute, you know? That's exciting.

Harry: Thank you so much. I’d just like to ask you one last question here. How would you like to move forward in life with your art?

John: That's a great question. Forward. I don't know, it's always a discovery for me. I think it's kind of a mystery in a lot of ways. Whereas when I first started making art, I thought of things that in more project based, discrete, modular terms where it's like, oh I'm going to do this project. And then that project's over, and then I move on to this project. Certainly working in a public art context and working with the Larimer seniors has changed my practice. And in a huge way where, you know, we started working together in 2017 and we're still working together in 2025. There's so many little things that came out of that.

There's the sign project we did, there's the Tony books, there's a newsletter that we created during the pandemic, there are field trips we take, right? That's just like all these things I could have never anticipated and they also don't neatly fit into “here's this thing I did.”  Whereas if [it was] a project [from] eight years ago, I could be like, here's this discrete thing I did [and it’s a] complete package with concept and execution and exhibition.

Whereas this other thing with the seniors reflects an innate desire that I already have with geology, which is about long term engagement and long term shaping through not being aware of how it's being shaped, but being engaged in a meaningful way and allowing that to give shape to these things, which is what happened with the seniors in a lot of ways.

And I think I feel that happening in my drawing process, too, where it's like I have made over 15 years of drawings. You know, I took two of those years and I put them in a grid so you could see the value shifts. You can't read any of the drawings, but you can see dark, light, dark, light…I put the two years next together and realized that [for] almost half of the year they got super light and then they went back to being dark.

And when I go through the drawing, I was able to realize — oh that was when I was having a lot more anxiety and I was having trouble committing to making marks on paper because of the apprehension. When one struggles with anxiety, you don't want to make it. You don't want to make a peep. You don't want to make a move, right? You're kind of gingerly. And I was like, wow, I didn't realize it because I was in it. But now, looking at the marks I made, you can see how it affected my hand. So there's this exciting thing for me to discover moving into the future.

See more of John’s work at johnpena.net