Sometimes you go to an unexpected place. Here are some recent images from a visit to QuintanaRoo and the lovely village of Akumal on Mexico’s Caribbean coast.
All Photos © Iskra Johnson
Choro Loco! New works about listening to music…..
The other night I went to a concert of Choro music at The Chapel, a hidden gem of a concert venue. My friend Jere Smith, an artist in good standing at the good Shepherd Center, introduced me to this exquisitely calibrated performance space. Phenomenal acoustics and an architecture of reverential mystery: you don’t forget your listening moments here. I was completely swayed by Choro Loco and it’s dedicated cast of musicians on clarinet, accordion, guitar and triangle. I have never seen a clarinetist undulate like smoke– who knew this was a sexy instrument???
I got into that music space, where notes take color-shape and the 1930’s blend with 1910 and future-perfect and perfect-past in five languages. Remembrances of tango, waltz, polka, and sophisticated new-music grooves all interwoven into a heady eutophia — that’s utopia mixed with euphoria in case you haven’t yet been. Soon I pulled out my cell-phone, and started photographing in the low-res light. Herewith the first three prints in a new series called Choro: Listening to Music. All source material: Droid photos. Alcohol gel prints on Arches 88.
© Iskra Johnson
First Image of the New Year: The Golden Bird + Thoughts on Mixed Media
On New Years morning a Varied Thrush made a rare appearance in the bare maple above the pond. I photographed him through the window and a few hours later made a transfer print from the photograph onto layers of metallic silver, gold and luminescent white. I made four prints, each time trying new ways of burnishing the transparency. I found that by spraying water on the actual transparency material I could get a feeling of old world mezzotint–with no control. Then I started brushing the painted paper with water instead, using varying pressure to gradually adhere the ink with more fidelity to the plate.
I have a new Epson 3880 and it behaves very differently from the 2400. Previously I used alcohol to make transfers, but it left a thin skin on the paper resistant to subsequent overlays. The ability to transfer with water alone is exciting–no toxic fumes, and the surface is lovely, much more like silkscreen. I am finding that the transfer film has to sit for at least ten minutes after it comes out of the printer–it seems that the ink then “cures” and lifts more readily to water or to an acrylic medium, like opaque matte gel.
In photographic mixed media work I am looking for an immediacy of narrative in which I can look onto my world, capture it, and engage in a process that reveals more about the experience than I “know” in the moment. It is intimate and magical because through the process of pulling the print I can slow time down and go back to the initial glimpse of the experience of the “real,” of what I thought I saw– before it has been given language. For this afternoon I felt as not that I was looking through glass at a bird, but that I perched in the tree, privileged to visit the first bright day of the new year with the bird’s own eyes.
Head detail, from another version
The Promise of Light: Solstice 2010
What an extraordinary Winter Solstice: a total lunar eclipse! It all happened behind a cloud over my house and I take it on faith. For me the moon is this golden poppy, speaking of the dreamscapes of warmth and light that keep us constant in winter.
Notes on Saul Bellow
One of the great pleasures of the gray days is coffee combined with the New York Times Book Review. I look forward to this moment for the way the newsprint reflects the color of the winter sky, the endlessly inventive illustrations and for the writing: often the reviewers leave me with as much to linger over and absorb as the books themselves. This week carried a particularly beautiful review by Leon Wieseltier of the letters of Saul Bellow. I am a letterkeeper. I belong to the vanishing lineage of those who dwelled in garrets and drawing rooms and “prewar flats” and lived to transcribe the moments of their lives for people they would never see but nonetheless carried with them as vital witness. To look back on letters from this century of the instant-message and the tweet has a special poignance.
What spoke to me most in this review were Bellow’s insights on metaphor, symbol, ideology and creative resilience. As a visual artist, narrative and symbol are my guiding frames of reference. But both can be hazardous to successful art. I take to heart these excerpts, as wisdom to work and live by.
“…the poetry of his prose, its force of consciousness, lay always in its fidelity to the concrete. In the appearances of things and circumstances and psyches, he discerned the revelatory details…“American books, including my own…pant so after meaning. They are earnestly moral, didactic; they build them ever more stately mansions, and they exhort and plead and refine…. A work of art should rest on perception.”
“Ideology is of no use to us in refurnishing the empty house….” What is of use, by contrast, is humanism. Humanism is “the most subversive of all — and I am a Humanist.” The absence of irony from that avowal is like a cool breeze. Trotsky, Rich, Steiner: Bellow was forever chasing the answer, but his disappointment in belief never dissuaded him from the chase. “The best of me was formed in the jumps.”
Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition.”
Read the complete review.
Photo collage from a series in progress called “Werkspace” about the physical and emotional space of creativity. Original photos by Iskra Johnson taken at Pratt print studios in Seattle.
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