My Mizzou Story

Nick Pena

Alfred Hitchcock would have understood Nick Pena’s unusual paintings with their skewed perspectives of family road trips.

Pena’s haunting images of vintage 1970s station wagons serve as metaphors for a past society and its nuclear family of mom, dad, kids and a dog. His oil paintings create a convincing world that is memorable yet strange.

Three of the former art student’s images appear in the 2006 issue of New American Paintings No. 65, a catalog of winners of the Open Studio Competitions. Pena is one of only 30 artists whose work was selected from more than 1,000 entries.

Jacknife (oil on canvas) Life isn’t perfect on Pena’s canvases. He accents the imperfections of a perfect world by juxtaposing wrecked and abandoned station wagons in picturesque landscapes that are more suited to
19th-century Romanticism.

The paintings provide sad but hopeful commentary on a culture that Pena believes has abandoned traditional family structure. “Take a road trip and participate in the American dream,” Pena says in translating the message of the series.

With a camper in tow, one station wagon parks distressingly close to the edge of a precipice. Another has ended its journey in a collision with a lamppost. A third is immobilized with a tire boot.

Pena painted the pieces for inclusion in his MFA thesis exhibition before he graduated in December 2005. He now teaches Introduction to Art as well as Beginning Painting at MU, and Introduction to Figure Drawing at Columbia College.

His most recent paintings continue to explore society through its connection to cars. This time, however, the atmosphere is more playful, and the cars are Hummers. “I see a lot of comedy in them,” he says.

Pena spent his childhood in Jonesboro, Ill., in the 1980s, where he shuttled — in a sedan rather than a station wagon — between the homes of his divorced parents.

Mosaics 2007