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You are here: Home / Archives for Architecture & Sense of Place / The Alaska Way Viaduct

Banksy Was Not Here: The Buddha Deconstructed, with Help from Keats

April 6, 2014 by Iskra Leave a Comment

I am thinking today about Banksy and about Keats. Why those two in one thought you might wonder, the romantic English poet and the bandanaed vandal? The answer lies in the idea of “negative capability,” first expressed by Keats in a letter about Shakespeare:

“… Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ (And elaborated later in another letter):  “What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion Poet… A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually filling some other body.’

I walk the waterfront in a cold spring rain, the water scuffed and gray, the Wheel paused mid turn and the roar of the viaduct behind me. The grind of traffic, the wind, the absent sun, the intense quiet within the noise. I look up, and there in the distance is the pale poet walking the daffodils and Lakes of England, and Banksy, spray painting a dark silhouette with a bright bouquet, or something darker with no flowers at all. A sly Rat, or a girl in windy skirt, holding the string of a balloon. Perhaps the beginning of a vine growing out of the sidewalk cracks. The poet disappears into symbol and reverie; the vandal tags walls with stenciled archetypes which look like “anybody could do it.” What Banksy has given us is a new appreciation of the wall as poet’s page writ large. We get to hold the irreconcilable opposites of fame and anonymity, of violation and communion, of alienation and mediation — offerings placed in front of the walker in the city, if we are prepared to see them.

I look back at the viaduct pillars and the empty parking lot. I look for the train tunnel, but it is gone, hidden behind a noise barrier put up for new condominiums. It is easy to become mesmerized by tracings in the concrete, the scribbles that seem like words but are not, the peeling banners, the errant sticker placed there for no reason other than that it was at hand height and the light was fading and someone had to move fast. I am distracted by a shifting memory of the afternoon when I last saw the tunnel, and the writing there spilling into the dark. Where is that photograph, taken with the Canon, was it 1998?

The-Old-Train-Tunnel
Pre-gentrification, the viaduct train tunnel.

When I get home I find this among dozens of new pictures on my phone:

No-Parking-With-Stab-The-Princess

And then I walk out into my garden and look at my standard concrete garden Buddha and remember some other photos.

 

Buddha-Princess-Evolution
Buddha-Princess Evolution: is this what they mean when they say the camera lies? Digital collage, deconstructed…..

 

And then I paint some paintings for a day or so, thinking about rust and dirt and the city and the Seattle sky.

Painted-Wood

And look at a lot of graffiti and start moving things around on 44 layers in three different files:Banksy-Was-Not-Here-Sreet-Buddha-ManifestationWhich is how the print above, “Banksy Was Not Here: Street Buddha Manifestation” manifested. (In answer to the person who asked me “Where is that wall?”)

This and ten other transfer prints in a series about the Alaska Way Viaduct are available at Zeitgeist for the Month of April.

 

 

Filed Under: Digital Collage, Meditation & Buddhism, Photocollage, Photography, The Alaska Way Viaduct, Transfer Prints Tagged With: Banksy, digital collage deconstructed, Iskra recent shows, keats, modern digital printmaking, negative capacity, street art, transfer prints, zeitgeist

New Images About the Alaska Way Viaduct: Understory & Overstory

March 16, 2014 by Iskra 1 Comment

I have just completed several of the final new images for the upcoming “Excavations” show at Zeitgeist. One portion of the show will be a series of 10″ x 10″ transfer prints devoted to the ongoing saga of the Alaska Way viaduct. The images are created from my photographs of the viaduct layered with painted and drawn surfaces made in response. This is a place filled with industrial strength beauty: loud, dirty, sometimes hazardous but always provoking.

I have been photographing the viaduct for at least 25 years, and this iconic structure is an enduring object of affliction. Many of the collages are based on recent cellphone photos taken from a moving car. This is the glimpse, the rapture of the vista, the overstory. But this one, the most recent piece, uses as its backdrop an analog photograph I took over 20 years ago when the train tunnel could still be seen. I stood for hours one long gilded afternoon waiting for trains, and documented the graffiti as it changed color in the refracted sunlight of the bay. Now that tunnel is invisible, walled in behind condominiums. This is the understory. As with all of the images in this series reality has been subtly collaged and reconstructed.

Banksy Was Not Here: Street Buddha Manifestation
Banksy Was Not Here: Street Buddha Manifestation, Transfer print, © Iskra Johnson
Understory 1
Understory 1, Saturday 1 PM, Transferprint, © Iskra Johnson

Meanwhile, although the cracks are getting larger we still drive. Best view of the sky anywhere:

Drive-By In Orange: The Viaduct
Drive-By In Orange, Transferprint, © Iskra Johnson

Each transfer print originates from the same image, but the transfer process creates a unique monoprint each time, with different surface qualities and subtle variations in color. I often make only one print of an image, but in some cases the variations possible are too interesting to pass up. This particular print has several variants, as I experimented with the grain of the ink and application of the transfer medium. In this version I “wiped” the paper as I would a zinc plate, to get the organic washed quality of the sky.

Mark your calendar for the opening, First Thursday April 3rd, 6-8 at Zeitgeist. A reminder will come closer to the date.

Filed Under: Photocollage, Prints, The Alaska Way Viaduct Tagged With: Alaska Way Viaduct, graffiti in art, industrial art, Iskra shows, street art, street collage, tansfer prints, transferprint collage, understory in art, walls in collage, Zeitgeist coffee seattle

Driving While Dreaming, Two Studies of the Alaska Way Viaduct

February 21, 2014 by Iskra Leave a Comment

I am hard at work on my series of prints about the Alaska Way Viaduct. Big Bertha, our sensitive and emotionally overwrought digging machine is helping me out by quitting on the job. We may have several extra years to contemplate incipient ruin, the subtleties of patina and the beauty of going nowhere.

Enroute
Enroute. One of my favorite arrows.

This morning I started on a new collage with Pandora in the background set to my favorite station, which I am guilty, guilty, guilty of listening to instead of finding each song individually or listening to mixtapes made by friends 30+ years ago. The station, wouldn’t you know, is named for the father of music for airports Brian Eno. I do like this phrase from the Rolling Stone review of 1979, “...there’s a good deal of high craftsmanship here, but to find it, you’ve got to thwart the music’s intent by concentrating.” The trick of collage is often to concentrate while not concentrating, a sleight of hand through which something interesting may appear. Mr. Eno and his friends are the perfect soundtrack to encourage this state of mind.

As I was working, shifting layers back and forth and on and off and testing all the ways two simple images can converse and transform each other, I thought about driving and the visual emotional space of the car, which is so entirely married to music. I got my first and only car, a gray Toyota Corolla, in 1989. I will never take it for granted. The first time I sat on a lookout at sunset and turned on the radio I had a kind of American Satori experience: so this is what they were talking about! I get to sit here in my room on the street and just turn the dial and look out at the view?

The view of course is what the lovers of the viaduct will miss the most when it comes down. It is the last populist vista, where you don’t have to pay big dollars to see The Mountains and the Sound which make us want to live here. When it is gone we will have to buy a multi-million dollar penthouse condo or use binoculars to peer across the six to eight lanes of traffic they propose to go on top of the tunnel, which by then will cost 10 dollars per trip and which no one will use because who wants to drive in the dark?? Hmmm.

The music of this situation is both requiem and anthem, weaving its modal intervals in and out in lane changes and near-misses and ultimately onto the great offramp of what-it-is. Requiem for what is to be lost, anthem for what we can still see if we ditch our worries about gas and earthquakes and just go for a drive. I checked Pandora to see what lovely song was transporting me: “Ballad of Distances” from The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid, and “Requiem for a Dream” by the Kronos Quartet. Gotta love this many-splendored synchronistic modern life.

Ballad Of Distances 1
Ballad Of Distances 1, Transfer Print, 10″ x 10″, © Iskra Johnson
Ballad Of Distances Part 2
Ballad Of Distances Part 2, © Iskra Johnson

Stay tuned for details on my upcoming show, “Excavations,” at Zeitgeist, opening the first week of April.

Filed Under: Digital Collage, Photocollage, Prints, The Alaska Way Viaduct Tagged With: Alaska Way Viaduct, art about construction sites, art about urban renewal, ballad of distances, Big Bertha, Big Dig, brian eno, collage to music, photo collage

“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

 

Terminal 5
“Terminal 5 ,” © 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.

Filed Under: Construction/Reconstruction, Photography, The Alaska Way Viaduct Tagged With: Alaska Way Viaduct art, Ash Grove Cement, cellphone art, drive-by photography, industrial art, Maxfield Parrish Clouds, memory in art, monprinting with a computer, printmaking and digital process, Terminal 5 print, the Big Dig, the golden hour

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Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: I added baking soda to my gesso. Pretty wild texture here, not sure yet how stable it is. You can see the test of the edges in the second piece— the rugged edge only works if I get a pristine background and unfortunately the tape I used to mask it did not work consistently. Hello tape, my old friend and nemesis. You work differently on every surface. These little barn structures give me great comfort as the bigger structures of our government and nation seem to be crumbling.
Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the fields somewhere, on the road to Edison. Acrylic on prepared ground, sketchbook.
MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai We MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei at Seattle Art Museum.
I am thinking this morning about the phrase Americ I am thinking this morning about the phrase American Heartland. Learning to paint a barn means studying the neutrals. Our political discourse has pitted the barn people against the city people and there are no neutrals, just shouting. But if you walk out into the horizon lands, all you hear is the wind and a kestrel. Walk in boots, hard-pressed against your toes, walk on stubble barefoot and get acupuncture for a lifetime. Study the intervals: how the clouds can be in the upper one third neatly or one sixth, precarious, the future disappearing with the sun as it falls making the barn your whole world if you’re three years old and looking up; one big triangle with a square in the center, and so many mysteries inside the square. 

There is also the question of what kind of light seeps between the verticals and is the light coming in the evening or at midday when you can finally begin to make out all the other tiny squares within the big square, which would be called hay. Reach for the rope and swing out over the canyon, that great big canyon from bale to bale.

Collage studies: painting neutrals
A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yor A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yorker this morning, about the global population crash. This will upend urbanism, for sure, though it will very good for veterinarians and dog groomers:
“Only two communities appear to be maintaining very high fertility: ultra-Orthodox Jews and some Anabaptist sects. The economist Robin Hanson’s back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that twenty-third-century America will be dominated by three hundred million Amish people. The likeliest version of the Great Replacement will see a countryside dotted everywhere with handsome barns.”
First Thursday. Such a beautiful night. First Thursday. Such a beautiful night.

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