IskraFineArt

Summerlight

This is the summer of endless elegy. The forms and colors of winter persist even as the sun comes out for a day or two and temperatures climb above 70. The newly planted vine maple is already turning red and I have not yet gone swimming. Only the foxgloves have been jubilant; this is the year I realized they aren't weeds and let them go wild, a pearl and purple trumpet section playing throughout the garden.

© 2011 Iskra Johnson 

This transfer print blends the layers of sunlight past and autumn's melancholies. The echinacea laid its stems at my feet last October. The sunlight came from my favorite yellow wall at 85th and Greenwood, photographed in 2009, recently graffittied with a luscious red heart and then abruptly painted beige. I am glad I captured its past life in my archives.

I am focusing on transfer prints exclusively right now, enraptured with the tools of the camera and the newest version of Photoshop. I am in that place where you try absolutely everything and sit back dazzled, and then subtract ninety percent of the possible, in search of the necessary. I'll be moving back and forth all summer between two very different themes: the garden, and the street. The hard urban surfaces seem to need the antidote of what grows from the watering can and dirt.

Linda Davidson's "Ormolu" at Catherine Person

My experience of gilding is limited to the placid world of calligraphy. Gold leaf fragile as butterfly wings rests on a red pillow. One lifts it to vellum and burnishes it onto a raised glue to form letters and ornaments. There is drama in the lift and the burnish and the potential failure to adhere, but one's life is not in danger. In contrast, the centuries-old term "Ormolu" refers to the process of applying gold to bronze using fire and mercury. Gilders rarely lived beyond forty. 

I can hope that Linda Davidson is with us for twice those years and more. Her current installation at Catherine Person Gallery is breathtaking. It's the kind of experience that rearranges your braincells and your perception of the world. Nearly five hundred tiny individual paintings reach from floor to ceiling in a symphonic arrangement of blues, grays, true golds and mysterious ochers. There are quotes of the Baroque and fragments of airplane wings, abstract deconstructions juxtaposed with radiant clouds and brewing storms. The pieces soar in a choral progression towards a sky filled with ghosted putti, fragments of halo and exquisite compositions of the solitary image, a feather, a dog, a falling hand. At the bottom and the top bas relief constructions frame the edges, suggesting both the junkyard and the antique treasures of  a forgotten museum. 

As Person said after I had been there for the first half hour, (to be followed by another), this is the only exhibit she's had where people have spent time on their knees and on ladders. Each time you look a new astonishment reveals itself. The range of surfaces includes plaster, mirror, metal, stamped resin, and many I could not determine, and a virtuoso vocabulary of painting methods from muralistic realism to abstract gesture. Some of my favorites were pure pencil on what appeared to be plaster, stunning compositions of line asserted, interrupted and obscured in delicate overlapping layers. 

The overall installation works through the genius of juxtaposition and sequences knit into an anthemic whole. But each individual painting is for sale, and in the back of the gallery nails have been thoughtfully provided for the patrons of this work to arrange their selections in various orders. The prices are more than reasonable. The paintings are small, but they redefine scale. Somehow Davidson has mastered the art of composition so that each one is both a successful miniature and monumental, holding your gaze from across the room.

I plan to go back, and I can't urge you strongly enough to go, absorb this work, and consider taking some part of it to live with you. I felt altered as I drove home along Elliott at sunset. I hope I will be forgiven for posting this small homage, a Linda Davidson sky, my version, taken with my cellphone at dusk.

 

The Loneliness Project: Is Reality Contagious?

Five days ago a story came out on the companion piece to research on social networks and happiness, what I'll call "The Loneliness Project." I have been following the story, the spin and the reader comments with fascination. The story as originally printed seems to suggest that like an illness loneliness is contagious, and it takes a very short leap to reach the conclusion that one should avoid lonely people to avoid catching it. Many of the reader comments posted online are vitriolic in their insistence that the poster "has never been lonely a day in their life" accompanied by helpful comments that lonely people should stop wallowing and just get over it.

In many of the study summaries a sentence appears at some point with a variation on the theme that "this suggests that human connection is important and so are social networks." And yet the framing of the information (with subheads that resemble warnings for swine flu) shapes the response: shun, blame, and flee. I have not yet dug deeply enough to find responses from the pastoral community. But it does seem if we are statistically an overwhelmingly Christian Nation (83% based on the most recent polls) that someone would speak up for loving kindness. I am waiting for the Compassion Project, and wondering which community is monitoring itself for signs of willingness to talk to outcasts.

I had some trepidation when I started looking for happiness as an intentional daily practice, both in my artwork and the life of my mind. I was raised with a fierce, clear-eyed and self-congratulatory atheism by parents who had no patience with organized religion or its homilies. I was trained early to mistrust happy people, because well, the pessimists are always right, and only fools and Pollyannas smile on a regular basis when we all know theworldisgoingtohellinahandbasket. It seemed quite radical to confront this familial doctrine with its antonym: yes the optimists may be wrong, but they seem to be happy. I'd like some of that.

I did a series of drawings at one point called "Dialogue Between an Optimist and a Pessimist" in which I looked at the compensations of both world views.
It is deeply satisfying to go into the world with the intention to find beauty, to share it and to experience joy. And yet I also find that  facing darkness, emptiness, that handbasket multiplying with its sorrows, is just as necessary, and it brings its own happiness. At the risk of being a homilist peddling tired truisms, I don't see how you can have one without the other. And I don't see how you can have a healthy society if you  walk around only smiling  and keeping your heart tucked in your back pocket for fear of being shunned. 

Finally for artists and other purveyors of creatively arranged information there is the question of responsibility, for which I have no answer but only endless questions. You can take any battle scene and film it in lovely sepia tones and play Brahms as a sound track. You can read the news of the daily wars and clip out only the photos of the two Afghan children running in sunlight through the ruined city. I love that photo, so much so that I ordered a large print of it from AP wirephoto. You can hide the other photos in the wastebasket, and you can only watch SnoWhite and The Sound of Music, both favorites of mine. But I am not sure you can ever escape the more complex contagion of the Real. Anybody up for another viewing of Schindler's List?

Walking Meditation

I have been visiting the lake often in this early Autumn. The season has changed and has scrubbed this magic circle bare of fun-lovers and tourists. The colors are quiet, the birds now own the diving platform and the reeds wholly. The mothers, the strollers, the nature stalkers and the brooding contemplatives are left to themselves to notice what they see.

I have been thinking a lot about the nature of "Photographicness." The camera's eye is so irreducibly clear and the screen so translucent. It seems more real than real. And yet when the artifact of this seeing makes its transition unaltered to its home on paper it goes through a metamorphosis. In some ways it seems to die. The more "real" something is the more I recognize it. And the more quickly I look away, as though I "know" what it has to tell me already.  So I have been experimenting with subtraction, reduction and what happens when you modify a photographic image through the alchemy of transfer printing. This first image is an image that lives in digital form only. The second one is an archival pigment transfer on Lustro Dull Cover.

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Why? The Buddhist and the Secular version of the Big Question.

 

The Ice Cream vendor returns with The Big Question on his mind. He wanted it, he did try. But he finds himself on Wanted posters all over town.

Archival transfer prints 14 by 20 inches on Fabriano watercolor paper.  © Iskra Johnson 2009

Lake Light

Transfer print on watercolor paper.                                                       

Light Study II

The light is so brief in the Northwest. I feel panicked to capture it and keep it and put it in a bottle up high in the window where I can see it every day. Transfer print with water color 14 x 20 inches.

Composition with Summer and Odd and Even Numbers

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The Happiness Project in another guise......Mixed media on paper, 10 by 17 inches.

The Happiness Project

Be Happy

Seattle has never seen weather like this. 100 degrees in the shocked garden, 95 in the studio, 91 in the kitchen. The heat melts all resistance. Complete strangers walk up to you and offer to buy you an ice cream cone. It is easy to keep walking until midnight, around and around the lake. Why eat dinner until the moon sets?

I find myself thinking of happiness, and of ice cream. Of Bobby McFerrin and the melodies of ease and satisfaction. This little toy has been my companion for so many years I have lost count. He requested a portrait, and I have obliged. The pieces in this series are created with my own photography, drawing and assemblage, and reproduced as transfer prints from an archival Epson on rag paper. Each one is unique, and close up the surface resembles woodblock or letterpress. I have not been able to edition these yet because it is so hot the plates rip the paper. As soon as the weather shifts however prints will be available for sale.

The Marble Game

     Thinking About Thinking

But What About the Penguins?

This print keeps changing as the temperature gets so high that the thermostat....oy, it has actually broken. But as I said above, resistance is futile. Now I think I will take a cold shower and then I really should go to the store and open the freezer door at the Haagen Daz department.