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Gouache Bootcamp at Fort Worden

August 26, 2013 by Iskra 2 Comments

I have been possessed by my camera for the past few years, and in spite of public avowals that I was going to “get back to painting” evidence of new paintings has been scarce. So when I saw an opportunity to take a weeklong intensive in gouache through Gage Academy with realist painter Karen Hackenberg I leapt. What better antidote to procrastinating impulses than a retreat at Fort Worden, where I could incarcerate myself in a creative compound with fellow artists?

The fort, a former military battery designed to protect the entrance to Puget Sound, sits high on bluffs above the Straits of Juan de Fuca. The landscape ranges from saltwater shore to open meadow and forest, and the vistas are breathtaking. Centrum, which partners with Fort Worden, provides multi-media programming and coordinates facilities. Its mission is focused on creativity, connection and renewal, and as you move about the grounds you meet fascinating people radiating exactly these qualities. In Centrum’s own words: “It’s a place where the land stops, the sea begins, and the mind keeps going.”

Barracks Bed, slightly off center, as perhaps it should be for artist quarters.

I started my stay with a walk on the beach in search of objects for a still life, and to get my mind into the abstract state required to see in paint.

Visitors do not seem to need a book deal or an NEA grant to go about rearranging the beach. These are just a fraction of the useless battlements and airy fortifications I came across– far better than a museum for a lover of sticks.

As I wandered the beach I was reminded of one of my favorite passages from Leonard Koren’s book on Wabi-Sabi:

Definition of “aesthetic”…. refers to a set of informing values and principles — guidelines — for making artistic descriminations and decisions. The hallmarks of an “aesthetic” are 1) distinctiveness (distinct from the mass of ordinary, chaotic non-differentiated perceptions), 2) clarity (the aesthetic point has to be definite — clear — even if the aesthetic is about unclearness, and 3) repetition (continuity.)

The fort environment itself pulls you into the heart of paradox. You look up from reverie on golden yarrow, snowberry and roses to the harsh silhouettes of concrete battlements. Fort Worden was built in the early 1900’s, and the parade grounds rang with the boots of storied generals like August Quarles and Aronson Randol for whom the ruins are named. Among these purposeful ghosts now ramble barefoot banjo players and writers gazing into the distance and painters studying the shapes of clouds.

At any hour, and with much appreciated leavening, you will encounter Bambi, who’s benign gaze seems to bless all forms of artistic experimentation and failure. Sometimes there are berries left for a human breakfast.

Fortified by the muse I began my painting days, starting with still life painting and moving into more adventurous explorations of the medium. We each set up our own objects with a single light source. I worked on 300 pound hotpress Lanaquarelle, which I discovered does not like frisket. It does however adore the paint, and I have fallen madly in love with its velvet surface. On the first study I left the paper white as in traditional watercolor and in the second I masked out the objects and did an opaque wash, returning later to fill in the central subjects.

Still Life Setup, with petrified octopus, twig and feather from the beach. Somehow I thought these would be easy…..

Specimen Still Life in Gouache — Specimen Still Life in gouache on hot press paper

Stick Feather Octopus Specimen Study — Stick, Feather and Petrified Octopus, round two. I had to get up and go talk to Bambi many times during this one.

When painting from life, still or otherwise, one can be assailed by competing impulses: awe and devotion, an almost painful form of supplication to “the real” — and another wilder desire to create in the same way as “life,” with its exuberant dance of omniscience and intuition. I found the quote that Karen keeps on her drawing board the perfect motto for this practice: “Beauty is the love that we devote to an object.”— Paul Serusier.

However, it is important to honor the lessons of restlessness as much as devotion. [Read more…]

August

August 16, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Sometime in the last week August remembered itself and began changing. This is not a month obvious with new beginnings. It doesn’t announce itself with bright resolutions or an accounting of all that has been figured out. It writes itself in twigs and sprinkler water. It explodes from its own fullness: the split pod, the swollen tomato, the echinacea’s violet paper bent back like wings from a gilded heart.

It’s all too much.

I stand barefoot in my nightgown, yellow grass harsh against my toes and watch the sky grow pink in early morning. The house, unused to sun-colored earth, seems to float. Are there things to do? Did I have ambition? It melts into one impulse: to walk through the garden with my arms full of poppies, to shake them until their dry rattle is all I can hear.

Photography and text © Iskra Johnson

My House Is Not A Tree: Art, Shamanism & The Demon Flicker

August 1, 2013 by Iskra 4 Comments

Awhile back I had a Flicker on the side of my house. By the wording of that sentence you may know that I mean attached as though with adhesive, firmly anchored, determined, and loud. A Flicker is a bird that thinks your house is either A) a piece of wood that he can bore into and coax ants into or B) a dead tree or soon to be dead tree that already has ants and other insects living in it rent free — insects which the Flicker plans to have for breakfast, between 4 and 5 AM.

On a fine spring morning you may find yourself barefoot in your bathrobe with a garden hose, screaming and spraying into the eaves as the protected and very handsome bird looks over his shoulder at you and says, “Huh.” If you are me, you start painting pictures to explain the situation — to the bird.

House Is No A Tree — My House is Not A Tree © Iskra Johnson

This went on for quite awhile. I tried a lot of different approaches to organizing the message. Some were direct, some were oblique.

I grew in a strange way quite fond of him. I assumed he was a him. When he attacked the gutters I nicknamed him Donald Rumsfeld, remember him?

Flicker: Getting To Know You, © Iskra Johnson

I tried reversing him, and I gave him a very fine tree with lots of bark. And finally I did this painting, the last in the series, which may have been the one that finally got the message across, because he went away and I have never been bothered since:

I recently was approached by someone who also had a bird attached to her house, and she took possession of this painting to see what powers it might have. I requested that my patron sign an indemnification agreement, as I cannot guarantee that this kind of magic will work twice. And it occurs to me tonight as I look around the studio and into the eaves that I may have broken a rule of art and magic, as now my bird is gone, and perhaps along with it the protective spell. Tomorrow morning, if you see a woman in her bathrobe spraying a garden hose into the sky and shouting in some strangled and incomprehensible language, that will be me.

New Portfolio of Construction Site Photography

July 9, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Landscape With Concrete Forms, © Iskra Johnson

I photographed my first construction site over 30 years ago. At least three men with bullhorns shouted at me as I walked a long gangplank into the center of an open pit the size of a city block. I could not resist the bright red ladders, the spiking rebar and randomly thrown coils of wire, the orange triangles and cones and wooden spools, the augurs and blades – all massed against a landscape of mud brown and gray. The scene spoke of the chaos phase of creativity, when shape and sense are only dimly glimpsed, and anything is possible. Not to mention that it was BIG. A few months later the newspaper carried a piece about a woman in an evening dress with a cast on her arm who was found, drunk and asleep on a beam in the unfinished 6th story. It occurred to me then that not for nothing do they measure skyscrapers in “stories.”

My fascination with monumental structure, excavation, history, surface and the ambiguous terrain between ruin and renewal has continued as our world has moved into a phase of urban development in hyperdrive. You can visit any city in the world and see the unmistakeable filigree of orange cranes rising above the skyline. The new landscape incorporates an ever-changing theater of half-walls, scaffolds, massive draperies and open pits girded by barriers as interesting as what is behind them.

The photographs here reflect the influence of the theory of wabi-sabi: nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect. And within this recognition lies a very particular kind of beauty. Purely documentary photographs form the basis for much of my work in the series Construction/Reconstruction although I often obscure or alter them beyond recognition in the process of collage. The images in this new portfolio stand alone as photographs, a record of a singular time and place. Archival pigment prints are available in a range of sizes.

See more at: Construction Site Photography

“Drive-By”: The Alaska Way Viaduct at the Golden Hour

July 2, 2013 by Iskra 1 Comment

One of Seattle’s soon to be lost treasures is the Alaskan Way Viaduct. I had my office next door to it for eight years and learned to love and hate its noise and dirt and it’s hulking and fundamental “in-the-way-ness.” However, when one is not eye level from an office window cursing the dust and noise but rather on it or driving right next to it, perhaps at the golden hour, there are few more intoxicating sights than the Port and the great cranes and Elliott Bay glimpsed between its pillars.

This view is now complicated with additional intrigue by the Big Dig. If you love structures and infrastructure and seeing the bones of things, this is the place to be. I have taken hundreds of cellphone pictures on the drives to West Seattle and back, and have begun a project using these images called, quite literally, “Drive-By.” I am using digital media combined with painting to create what feel to me very much like old fashioned monoprints. I made monoprints for years using oil based ink on zinc, and I love the technique. It is a wonderful challenge to use digital technology with the same sense of play and spontaneity, using masks and layer effects to “wipe” the plate, and to print plates (translated as Photoshop layers) over each other, with infinite ability to adjust density and color.

Photography and print making are ideal ways to capture the sense of time flashing, of the way reality exposes itself on the retina and how then memory overlays one image onto another, like tissue paper through which color and a sense of the sky bleed through. In this case of course it is not just memory but motion itself creating the layers.

Three glimpses:

Drive By At Dusk The Port arachival pigment print — “Drive-by at Dusk: Hanjin” archival pigment print © iskra Johnson

Drive By 2 The Port archival Print — “Drive-by 2,” archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson

Drive-By-In-Pink:Hanjin — “Drive-by in Pink,” archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson

Drive-By Day Two: Cellphone Transfer Prints

I have not made any transfer prints in awhile, and it occurred to me that it might be the next step for these images. Cell phone resolution can be frustratingly chunky when printed large, but the transfer process takes natural advantage of soft blurs and ambiguities, and these images lend themselves to a tactile surface and intimate scale. On these two I used Apollo transfer film on hot press watercolor with spray alcohol (92%). It’s counter-intuitive, but for some reason the temperature today in the studio, which nearly matched that of the alcohol, seemed to help the process along.

It feels wonderful to surrender to color. I fell in love with Maxfield Parrish’s clouds in a junk shop when I was in the sixth grade. Ash Grove Cement might as well be a neo-Greek column, and that shape in the middle could be a neo-nymph looking up in reverie at plumes of steam. Who says industry isn’t romantic? And who can resist a name like “Ash Grove?”

Ash Grove Cement (For Maxfield Parish) transfer print — “Ash Grove Cement, for Maxfield,” transfer print on watercolor paper 7″ x 7″ © Iskra Johnson

"To Avalon," transfer print on watercolor paper, 7" x 7", © Iskra Johnson — “To Avalon,” transfer print on watercolor paper, 7″ x 7″, © Iskra Johnson

(Not yet printed, but I thought I would include it here to show the surface difference between the native image and prints with similar imagery.)

See more artwork on industrial themes at the print portfolios for Construction/Reconstruction and Infrastructure.

Drive-By Day Two: Cellphone Transfer Prints

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