IskraFineArt

"Still Life with History and Industry", a New Print from the Industrial Landscape

© Iskra Johnson             14 x 22 inches                     "Still Life with History and Industry"

A recent transfer print inspired by a visit to Harbor Island. 

Why I'm Not a Hiker

It is one of those evenings you live for in the Northwest. The sun is setting as the moon is rising, and the Sound lies in front of me between the arching Madrones like a big indigo plate, rimmed by deeper blue mountains. I am on my evening walk, not really in the city and not quite beyond. I can walk for hours and for miles in any shoes and any weather here. But when people tell me they are going “hiking,” I cringe. I can’t stand gear, or shopping for gear. Gear seems to be what makes a person a “hiker.” That, and not stopping, and accomplishing something.

I stop constantly. I accomplish nothing. I walk, and I am in constant awe, and I am hungry. The mountains stretch as far as I can see, the glazed sky speaks of Hokusai and all the great nostalgics and rhapsodists of days gone by. Rilke, Rachmaninoff, Grieg. An eagle flaps slowly overhead. There is no audience and so there is no soaring, only the pedestrian flap of immense wings. 

I like that where I live there are houses, and their amber lights blend with the first star and the distant freighter. I like that in March I go down into the ravine and in the rain and listening to its clatter on bare branches I hear the unmistakable keening of a woodpecker, and look and look and then discover him two feet in front of me, suddenly sharp in the foreground. And then someone walks by with their golden retriever, with the sound of metal and panting tongue and leather leash. I live in nature, without having to go to nature. She is everywhere.

As I climb the last hill I see the moon between the trees. We are not druids now, and who checks the tides before taking a walk on land? And yet we want to know. A woman passes, dressed in black sweats and reflector tape. “The moon! Is it full?”  

“Full enough for me.”

Industrial Landscape: Unique transferprint ©Iskra Johnson

Icons Under the Influence: New Digital Etching

Today, under the influence of the feature from Neurotribes on the sketchbooks of Susan Kare  this new street print came together. I have been madly in love with the bicycle icon for years, more so as the original ones have been blasted and worn by the treads of time and become so exquisitely beat up. It is thrilling to look at Susan's sketches and see the embryonic beginnings of the icon-life we take for granted today. When I look at the grid of the street and how it interacts with paint I can see the pixel principle, but thrown for an anarchist loop. I have driven or walked across this particular bicycle icon hundreds of times, and I think I can take credit for just a small fraction of its wabi sabi. This is a collage of etched paper, powdered pigment and photography printed as a transfer print on Arches 88.

 

©Iskra Johnson

To see my portfolio in icon and lettering design visit Iskra Design. My blog about letterforms, icons and alphabetic ephemera is Alphabet Roadtrip, which is where I also post my most recent book cover and design work.

The Reeds: Surface Tension

Every time I circle the Lake I stop and look at the reeds. Which ones have been broken by the heron since yesterday? Which one  snapped in the wind and now crosses its neighbor? The conversation changes slowly, infinitely, accompanied by wind and rain and the arc of the winter sun.

© Iskra Johnson

This is the plate before printing. It will be a mixed media transfer print, 16 by 22 inches. 

Ambiguity and Beauty

This morning I am at work on the idea of  the screen, as in a real analogue screen made of paper or silk, and the long tradition in Asian art of dividing the landscape into panels. When I walk around the lake, particularly in Autumn, when the leaves are so perfectly missing in places and hanging by a golden thread in others, I feel like I am walking right into a silk painting. As I've been working on this image of the willows, going back and forth between reflection and reality, water and sky, it occurs to me that ambiguity itself is beauty. 

"There is a Crack in Everything...That's how the Light Gets in"

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

November Meditation: The Blue Heron

Something about this time of year makes me feel like talking to Morris Graves. I feel like he is with me, brooding on leaves and picking up branches, and looking for the light in the fine grays and browns of the northwest melancholy. The heron has not been been to visit the pond in a long time. Perhaps this will call him back.

©Iskra Johnson transferprint on Arches 88

Street Language

A new print with my tireless companion, the Walking Man

© Iskra Johnson  Transferprint collage on Arches 88, 11" by 22"

 

Registering a Transferprint (Or how I came to realize the true sisterhood of calligraphy and printmaking.)

This summer I did a lot of experiments with mounting transferprints on panels and sealing them with with every varnish, glaze and UV protectant ever invented. And in the end, wondering why I was trying to make paper be something other than what it is, I've gone back to tradition: the print floating in a pristine field of luscious, deckled rag white.

I realize why I had avoided it. It's ridiculously difficult! The Arches is soaking wet with gel alcohol, the plate is flimsy and wants to buckle, and it is ready to deliver ink the second it touches down. You can't hinge the plate to the paper because usually it is smaller than the paper, and tape will tear the surface anyway. I recalled from my other life as a calligrapher that one cannot do the character for Mujo perfectly without doing several thousand imperfect ones and throwing them away. And one can't load the brush without ink, which must be ground, and then one must meticulously prepare the workspace with felt and weights so the fragile ricepaper does not fly away. All this preparation may take an hour. And without it, torn and blotted paper, ink that dries to pale whispers, and a profound sense of being out-of-groove.

 

 

Printmaking groove requires the same precision and attention. Several years ago I visited Stephen Hazel at his Studio Blu, and the laboratory glare of perfection made me gasp. I don't think there was dust anywhere in his zipcode. Thank you Stephen, for reminding me of the importance of order. Process = product.

To deal with the problem of the plates being smaller than the paper I bought large sheets of frosted mylar, which I hinged to my drafting table (which I covered with large sheet of plex.) I then drew various grids on the frosted side so I could position the plates, face up, to flop into correct position with even borders. I made an egregious technical error on one set-up, which was to place the plate on the frosted side, so the frosted mylar came into contact with the gel alcohol. The finish comes off over time and leaves a strange matte residue on the paper. 

Hinging solves a lot of problems but not all. The deckle of a full sheet allows for some out-of-square possibilites, and I have to be very careful about how the paper lines up along the edge of the carrier sheet. The only tape I found that could reliably hold the hinge without going out of square after awhile was blue painter's tape. Masking tape peels off the plexiglass and acetate too easily. And then...there is dirt. Hairs from the brush. Eyelashes, flywings, whatever can fall on that damp border of white paper will. I believe this is why the word "edition" means "pain" in certain languages, just as "danger" is supposed to equal "opportunity" at least according to those t-shirts at duty-free shops in Tokyo. Below, a finished print on the left, lined up to register with hinged plate on mylar on the right. *This was a quick photo and the finished print is placed upside down. It should mirror the plate.

 

 

Here is the first print done this way, not perfectly even borders, but getting close:

© Iskra Johnson, "Ode to StudioBlu"

Returning to Zen Practice: A Devotional Piece

This autumn I began practicing with a zen group new to me, the Blue Heron Zendo. I have been sitting in the Vipassana tradition for many years, but my roots are in zen. The black cushion, the tatami mats, the kosaku, the grinding of ink into the wee hours to fill baskets with rice paper covered in the Heart Sutra, I had left this but it had not left me. And so I found myself one Tuesday night at the top of a three story house in a formal temple dumbstruck by the most beautiful bell I have ever heard. Followed by bowing and chanting and inwardly objecting to chanting (which I long ago took a position against, after all I want to talk and with chanting you can hardly get a word in edgewise.) Two hours of walking, chanting, staring at the wall.

Clear mind, clear mind, don't know.

The heart sutra's bleak-but-not refrains of no-thing-ness, and images involuntary offering the balm of metaphor. Blessed metaphor: where is the sutra to you/for you? -- or must I look to the German sangha, to Rilke and the tormeted but ecstatic Europeans for that? "A Metaphor is a dangerous thing. A single metaphor can give birth to love."* 

This practice changes you.

Transfer print on Arches 88

* Milan Kundera, a Czechoslovakian zen master of literature.