Spring is coming too early; green shoots, unfurling leaves. I have been shouting at the clematis and honeysuckle and lillies to stop. We need more sleep, more dreaming time -- and snow is on the way. I am in winter still, in love with architecture.
© Iskra Johnson "Twig in Space: Botanika" 22 x 16 inches, mixed media
I can't shake the November state of mind today. The lowering skies, the gusting winds. The pond and the rake. The maple tree that has grown for 12 years along the south side of the water has that fatal illness of maples, with black rings inside its branches. This is the last year I will stare into its red lanterns in the summer afternoons, and sift its colors from tangled lillies and gravel in late Autumn.
On a recent aftrnoon the light fell in such a way that it looked like this, like a cliff, and an abyss, and a refuge, that crack in Leonard Cohen's wonderful bell, the dark and somber and jubilant Anthem:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
©Iskra Johnson
© Iskra Johnson
This morning the lawn was brilliant with yellow leaves and a windy light. By late afternoon the sky had darkened, and snow is predicted tomorrow. I looked at the fallen lillies and melting hostas, all the garden's brave last gasps of color, and laid my head upon the memory of summer. Where is that attic bedroom, that one with chenille bedspread and the embroidered pillow? The one where afternoon light motes were gold as pollen and the bees gathered in the windowsills....?
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.
On New Years morning a Varied Thrush made a rare appearance in the bare maple above the pond. I photographed him through the window and a few hours later made a transfer print from the photograph onto layers of metallic silver, gold and luminescent white. I made four prints, each time trying new ways of burnishing the transparency. I found that by spraying water on the actual transparency material I could get a feeling of old world mezzotint--with no control. Then I started brushing the painted paper with water instead, using varying pressure to gradually adhere the ink with more fidelity to the plate.
I have a new Epson 3880 and it behaves very differently from the 2400. Previously I used alcohol to make transfers, but it left a thin skin on the paper resistant to subsequent overlays. The ability to transfer with water alone is exciting--no toxic fumes, and the surface is lovely, much more like silkscreen. I am finding that the transfer film has to sit for at least ten minutes after it comes out of the printer--it seems that the ink then "cures" and lifts more readily to water or to an acrylic medium, like opaque matte gel.
In photographic mixed media work I am looking for an immediacy of narrative in which I can look onto my world, capture it, and engage in a process that reveals more about the experience than I "know" in the moment. It is intimate and magical because through the process of pulling the print I can slow time down and go back to the initial glimpse of the experience of the "real," of what I thought I saw-- before it has been given language. For this afternoon I felt as not that I was looking through glass at a bird, but that I perched in the tree, privileged to visit the first bright day of the new year with the bird's own eyes.
© 2011 Iskra Johnson The Golden Bird, Transfer print on metallic paint
Head detail, from another version
How Many Minutes from Yesterday: Garden, Early November © Iskra Johnson
In early August the garden tips from green to olive and then to ochre. With no help from the wind the magnolia drops its leaves. They dangle in the English privet like unmoored boats and drift down to form a dense impenetrable mat on the garden floor. Having put the moment off for weeks, I finally gather gloves and boots and rake and set to "clean up," a phrase that makes me shudder with the full force of laziness. In moments my industry is interrupted by fascination; I am lost in looking, and remembering my life in leaves.
© 2010 Iskra Johnson
I lived for many years near an alley that had what I thought of as "the psychedelic laurel." In the midst of this long, dense and mediocre shrub burned startling jewels. They fell into the dusty gravel and trash, and I collected them each morning on my walks. Soon I began recording them in watercolor, exploring how the variations in pattern and shape looked together in sequence. This marked the beginning of a long and obsessive affair with leaves as iconic specimens.
© 2010 Iskra Johnson "From One Tree," watercolor on hot press paper
Each Autumn I am again struck dumb with fascination, although each year the tree of my affection may change, as does the light, the temperature of the air, and the method of capture. I may take photographs, make collages, or paint. When the effects of what is politely referred to a "climate change" first appeared in an alarming El Nino cresting in 1995 I made this journal page as I watched the fruit tree beneath my window experience the strange juxtaposition of relinquishment and bloom.
© 2010 Iskra Johnson "That was the year when Spring and Fall came on the same day." Mixed media journal
One September I noticed the Golden Locust, its perfect ovals and graceful fronds ever present on the sidewalk beneath my feet. I pinned the leaves to a board as you would butterfly wings and raced to paint them before the lamp curled them in the heat.
© 2010 Iskra Johnson "Days of the Locust," water color on hot press paper
Several years later I started my current garden beneath two ancient Black Locusts, a distinctly different and less gentle breed. I traced my moods by their seasons, the snaking arabesques of their branches and the pods, which seemed to hold everything in their silver emptiness and swirling winds. I discovered unwittingly that the life span of an urban locust tree is rarely more than 80 years, which these had reached. Their lethal branches crashed down at random and terrifying moments, just missing my neighbors, and ripping the powerlines off my house. I had to take them down several years ago, and in the stumps we found pure powder at the core of one, and in the other a set of puzzle pieces, three trees in one growing away from each other and waiting to split off. For the three years since I have pulled out fifty young locust starts per day all summer. This tree, these pods, hold a relentless force.
© 2010 Iskra Johnson "The winds," printing ink on prepared ground
This year the magnolia captures me, and the smoke tree. I know I should be stacking leaves in a bag, but I can't stop looking.... To see more paintings from this series of work visit My Life in Leaves in the albums listed to the right. Most pieces are available for sale. Pieces posted on this page can be enlarged by clicking on them, but that function is temporarily unavailable in the albums. If you would like to see a piece larger let me know and I can email it to you.
© Iskra Johnson
The Cosmos is your basic "how to draw a flower-flower" with an upgrade. It has the round dot in the middle and the cheerfully radiating petals, but it has a subversive magic. Left to its own devices in a parking strip the stalks will grow five or six feet tall, their feathery leaves creating a diffuse haze that looks like smoke. The shade of pink transcends all others except perhaps the pink of sunset: it's the good pink. I made this drawing the other day after studying the first one to bloom in my April garden. It's good to see a bee show up and follow directions. Something is working in this world.
© Iskra Johnson
I have started a new drawing book that is having a big effect on every part of my life. I haven't drawn from life in a long time. I had forgotten how mesmerizing it is, and how when you look up hours later at random things the world seems to glow with color, and the new knowledge of how to mix shadows and light. As an unexpected side effect my daily memory has radically improved. I no longer stand in the kitchen five times a day wondering where I put my keys.
More to come on this project as it progresses.
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How are you supposed to concentrate on work when you have a gargoyle carving an ice sculpture in your front yard? When the freeze began a few days ago it looked like this shape might turn into an apple, but now there is no doubt: it's a heart, with teeth. Every bird in the neighborhood has come to visit and stand on his head. This morning brought a Steller's jay and a very large crow. Hysterical to watch a normally dignified crow trying to gain purchase on the gargoyle's icy lips, slipping and slipping again, looking up to see if anyone had noticed, and finally bending in a sly yoga pose to get a sip of water. To see more images from this sequence go to On Frozen Pond at Facebook.
