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Viktoria Viktoria Site Study: Future Residential on Second Avenue

October 5, 2012 by Iskra 4 Comments

It is exhilarating beyond measure to be alive in Seattle during this endless Indian Summer. (By the way, before using this phrase, this being the city of all things politically correct, I spent an hour researching whether in fact it is politically okay to use this phrase. I am going to go with this: As the American Indians were reportedly the first to notice the loveliness of this time and to celebrate the harvest by looking at the light and perhaps smoking a pipe rather than engaging in more frantic scurrying, worrying and stacking of crops in the barn (as the pale settlers were wont), when the phrase is invoked by a non-Indian person caught up in the intoxicating Autumnal rhapsodies it is in fact an homage to the wisdom of the First Nations, and understood as such.) Whew.

So I walk around, temporarily off the hook, and I can’t help but notice but the city is damn fine beautiful. I am sure nature is also doing something, but the construction sites are in their prime, as in primary colors, none of this faded pink of cosmos and hydrangeas and plum feather grass. Give me the street, the baylight glinting on scaffolds and glass, the scattered jump rope song of grafitti and the fifteen people gathered to watch the man in the Mercedes try to park his car in the the lot on Second Avenue with one-sixteenth inch margin of error and a flawless polish on that fender. Pretty much anytime of day is good light, because we actually have light which makes, yes, shadow. If you live here, you know.

Here is a piece that will probably go through another fifty iterations, but which has landed here, comfortably, for the moment. The rule for this series, (thank you John Cage for pointing out how necessary rules are in your fine book Silence) are simple. All elements of photographic evidence must come from an actual construction site. Paint and other elements layered into the work may come from my drawing table.

ViktoriaViktoria_Construction_Project_Photocollage
ViktoriaViktoria, 24 x 19 inches, photocollage, © Iskra Johnson

 

Filed Under: Construction/Reconstruction, Digital Collage, Photocollage, Prints Tagged With: construciton site collage, construciton site photography, digital collage of construction site, photocollage of building

What is a Transfer Print? (Artist Statement)

April 26, 2012 by Iskra 4 Comments

In a transfer print the plate is created by printing files from a computer imaging program like Photoshop onto an acetate carrier sheet. For initial output I use an Epson 3800 with archival ink. After the carrier sheet is sprayed with a solvent  the ink becomes liquified enough to transfer to paper or another surface through careful burnishing. Alternatively the plate is pressed by hand or roller onto a sheet of paper that has been soaked with gel alcohol, a solvent that transfers the ink to the paper without harming the paper’s surface. Each paper takes the ink completely differently. Soft watercolor or printmaking papers may absorb the ink with a fair amount of predictability, while others react with magical surface qualities that have a life of their own. The effects range from the dry paper-texture of letterpress to a granulation similar to aquatint or the watery translucency of traditional monoprints.

It takes a great deal of repetition and attention to detail to pull one successful print. I have learned that timing, humidity, pressure, and subtle overprinting or vandalism of the same plate multiple times can all have an effect on the image and whether it succeeds. In many ways the moment of printing is like calligraphy in its exactitude, physicality and openness to the accidents of the moment.

The photographic transfer process allows me to work with the full-color lushness of photographic reality. Like traditional printmaking there is a plate, and it is hands on, but unlike traditional processes you can print all colors at once. I’m really trying to figure out where a photograph lives in the world now. I love the luminous intensity of photography when seen on screen, but when the computer shuts off the image is gone. Photographs on paper don’t have the same back-lit radiance, and unless they are very carefully printed on fine paper, they may feel less like a “print” and more like “output.” In some ways, with the dazzling improvements in retina display, the computer monitor version of a photograph may begin to feel more like the “original” and the paper print the lesser reproduction.  Our world now has trillions of images, with more being born every second, an endless stream of brilliant photographic candy flowing across our monitors and phones. The sheer volume and immediacy of images, the constant now leaves no time for absorption (or what used to be called “meaning”) and threatens to wear out our collective synapses. What can a print, a fixed piece of paper, offer in this new world?

I am interested in artifact, object, a thing of presence that arrests you, makes you pause, and puts you back in human-centered time. But I also think the human brain is being reconfigured by new technologies, and they can’t really be ignored. The way Photoshop builds images mirrors our minds and how we remember and layer experience. Photoshop also mirrors a printing press, with the ability to stack “plates” in layers, with each layer affecting the one below in truly magical ways that can only be done with this tool. What interests me is how the new media can be integrated with the old, the tactile with the digital.

The transfer process is time intensive and very sensual. Every inch of the image is transferred by the pressure of my hand as the damp paper takes the ink from the plate. It can take up to a dozen prints to get one that has just the right balance of subtle surface texture and ink density, and each print takes about an hour to completely transfer. The images layered into the final plate merge digital photographic elements, enlargements of older analog prints, and the other media I work in, such as powdered pigment and paint. It’s exciting to feel that two very different worlds can be integrated. Older ways of making are not “obsolete” — they can be revisioned and combined with the new in ways that reflect the complexity of what it is to be alive in this time.

Filed Under: Transfer Prints Tagged With: about transfer prints, digital printing, modern printing methods, monoprint, photographicness, photography, the camera's eye, the street, what is a transfer print?, work about the camera

Still Life with History and Industry

April 23, 2012 by Iskra

Still Life With History and Industry
Still Life with History and Industry, transfer print, © Iskra Johnson

Filed Under: Photography, Transfer Prints Tagged With: harbor island, industrial landscape, transfer print

Icons Under the Influence: New Digital Etching

December 6, 2011 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Today, under the influence of the feature from Neurotribes on the sketchbooks of Susan Kare  this new street print came together. I have been madly in love with the bicycle icon for years, more so as the original ones have been blasted and worn by the treads of time and become so exquisitely beat up. It is thrilling to look at Susan’s sketches and see the embryonic beginnings of the icon-life we take for granted today. When I look at the grid of the street and how it interacts with paint I can see the pixel principle, but thrown for an anarchist loop. I have driven or walked across this particular bicycle icon hundreds of times, and I think I can take credit for just a small fraction of its wabi sabi. This is a collage of etched paper, powdered pigment and photography printed as a transfer print on Arches 88.

Bike Icon Transfer Print
Bike Icon, transfer print on Arches 88, © Iskra Johnson

To see my portfolio in icon and lettering design visit Iskra Design. My blog about letterforms, icons and alphabetic ephemera is Alphabet Roadtrip, which is where I also post my most recent book cover and design work.

Filed Under: Prints, Transfer Prints Tagged With: bicycle icon, digital etching, new transfer prints, print of bicycle icon, Susan Kare

The Reeds: Surface Tension

December 2, 2011 by Iskra

Every time I circle the Lake I stop and look at the reeds. Which ones have been broken by the heron since yesterday? Which one  snapped in the wind and now crosses its neighbor? The conversation changes slowly, infinitely, accompanied by wind and rain and the arc of the winter sun.

Surface-Tension_transfer print_Greenlake
Surface Tension, 1/2 ev, 30" x 22" paper size, 16.5" x 21" image size

This is the plate before printing. It will be a mixed media transfer print, 16 by 22 inches.

Filed Under: Transfer Prints Tagged With: photographic transfer print, print of nature and reflections, print of water and reeds, reflections in art

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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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