Last weekend I took a sun-blown walk along the waterfront, down to the Chittenden Locks and back up along Golden Gardens. I returned with over a hundred new photographs of the northern bay and renewed excitement about seascapes as a subject. Along the way I passed through the living rooms of those who sleep without doors. There is no bookcase, no lamp, but sometimes a bright red sleeping bag, some boots and a pillow. Perhaps the painted walls are [Read more…]
This week I have been participating in the “art challenge” thrown down on Facebook. I don’t know where these things come from, (likewise memes, where are they born? who runs the meme factory?) but this one seems to have started in the illustrator community and crossed over into the artist world that is my social media life. Unlike the chain letter of old in which a tattered mimeograph threatened karmic harm and financial ruin if you didn’t pass it along with five dollars to the next person, this benign version simply asks that you post three images for five days in a row, each time tagging a new artist. In the currency of the chain letter, five dollars is worth approximately one ‘like’, as one ‘like’ can, if you are fortunate accrue interest and become forty, and perhaps even lead to a comment. Which of course will not buy you a cup of coffee. [Read more…]
I’m working on a new series of collages about industrial waterways. The muse is the Duwamish, but the real subject is perhaps the print itself, the paper-space of real and unreal. I’ve been immersing myself in study of the masters. from Nick Bantock and Man Ray, to Yoshitoshi and Max Ernst. Is there anything so divine as rising at five in the dark and drinking tea surrounded by books, then watching the sun rise? Happiness reigns in this little corner of universe.
(1) “Postcard from The Straights” (2) “Duwamish Water Tower 2: From the Municipal Manual for Water Management”
Limited edition archival pigment prints, size variable © Iskra Johnson
“Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.”
― Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special
I would also say that joy is seeing and delighting in things as they are, which can be an elusive concept when your life gets caught up in a construction project. Construction projects by definition require making things different. Better. Fixed up. Everything is most definitely not ok as it is, otherwise why are you going to all this debt and trouble?
As I approach the move-in date for my new studio I’ve become aware that for much of the past five months I’ve been completely not-here, now, at all. My tattered meditation practice [Read more…]
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?
When I get home I find this among dozens of new pictures on my phone:
And then I walk out into my garden and look at my standard concrete garden Buddha and remember some other photos.
And then I paint some paintings for a day or so, thinking about rust and dirt and the city and the Seattle sky.
And look at a lot of graffiti and start moving things around on 44 layers in three different files:
Which 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.