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You are here: Home / Archives for Photocollage

The Floating World: New Prints at the Alexis Hotel

April 12, 2015 by Iskra Leave a Comment

“One must learn to float as words do, without roots and without watering cans. One must know how to navigate without longitude and without motor. Without drugs and without burdens. One must learn to breath like a wind instrument. The chord must be made of sand, the anchor of aurora borealis.” –– Anais Nin

“The term ukiyo-e, meaning “pictures of the floating world,” is a pun on a Buddhist phrase meaning “suffering world,” also pronounced ukiyo. Asai Ryoi defined the attitudes of the irresponsible but delicious floating world as “living just for the moment, focusing on the pleasure given by the moon, the snow, cherry blossoms, maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves by just floating, floating, ignoring the pauperism that stares us in the face, refusing to be disheartened, floating like a gourd that drifts along with the river –– this is what we call ukiyo.” –– Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, by John Stevenson

Yoshitoshi_Moon_Bucket
“The bottom of the bucket / which Lady Chiyo filled has fallen out/ the moon has no home in the water” –Yoshtoshi, portrait of the poetess Chiyo

The inspiration for my latest series comes from studying ukiyo-e and particularly the life and work of 19th century artist Yoshitoshi. Outside of comic book historians and collectors of Japanese prints, this renowned Japanese woodblock master [Read more…]

Filed Under: Digital Collage, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Photocollage, Prints Tagged With: alexis hotel, contemporary print making, Iskra shows, the floating world, woodblock inspirations, yoshitoshi

“The Shipping Lanes,” or, The Longshoreman Strike Illustrated

February 24, 2015 by Iskra 1 Comment

The-Shipping-Lanes-Print-Iskra
“The Shipping Lanes” limited edition archival pigment print, 25″ x 25″ © Iskra Johnson

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…]

Filed Under: Digital Collage, Photocollage, Photography, Prints Tagged With: artist union, chittenden locks, dockstrike, industrial art, limited edition print, maritime art, pigment print, seattle waterfront, shipping strike illustrated, view from golden gardens

Two New Haiku Without Words

January 14, 2015 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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.

 

Postcard_From_The_Straits_Digital_Etching

 

Duwamish Water Tower Digital Etching

 

(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

Filed Under: Collage, Digital Collage, Photocollage Tagged With: art about industry, collage art, digital etching, languages of collage, maps in art, pigment prints, the duwamish, the Straights, water tower art, waterways

Finding Contemplative Time In Modern Life

September 7, 2014 by Iskra 1 Comment

Contemple--les-Fleurs
Contempler les Fleurs, transfer print, 1/2 edition variable, 16″ x 21″, © 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…]

Filed Under: Digital Collage, Meditation & Buddhism, Photocollage, Photography, Transfer Prints Tagged With: art about chairs, Bleak Beauty, contemplative photography, contemplative time, found beauty, industrial beauty, old chevy, slowing down in modern life

In Neutral: The Gray Muse of Ebey’s Landing

June 27, 2014 by Iskra 2 Comments

Unarranged Arrangement
Unarranged Arrangement, Ebey’s Landing, © Iskra Johnson

“The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.”
                      ― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I think there is no better place for me to understand equanimity than the slender borderline between land and sea. To walk the shore on a gray day, with a warm wind in my hair and clouds low on the horizon, to become completely lost in the large rocks and the pebbles and the sand, finer and finer gradations of gray and brown and white and coral that the sea tosses up and time burnishes. It’s the middle path. No chasing after sunsets or epiphanies, [Read more…]

Filed Under: Meditation & Buddhism, Photocollage, Photography, The Spiritual in Art Tagged With: Ebey's Landing, gray mood board, inspired by gray, Leo Adams, neutral palette, northwest school, Whidbey Island beach

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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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