Still Life with History and Industry
Icons Under the Influence: New Digital Etching
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.
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.
The Reeds: Surface Tension
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.
This is the plate before printing. It will be a mixed media transfer print, 16 by 22 inches.
Ambiguity and Beauty
This morning I am at work on the idea of the screen, as in a real analogue screen made of paper or silk, and the long tradition in Asian art of dividing the landscape into panels. When I walk around the lake, particularly in Autumn, when the leaves are so perfectly missing in places and hanging by a golden thread in others, I feel like I am walking right into a silk painting. As I’ve been working on this image of willows, going back and forth between reflection and reality, water and sky, it occurs to me that ambiguity itself is beauty.
“There is a Crack in Everything…That’s how the Light Gets in”
I can’t shake the November state of mind today. The lowering skies, the gusting winds. The pond and the rake. The maple tree that has grown for 12 years along the south side of the water has that fatal illness of maples, with black rings inside its branches. This is the last year I will stare into its red lanterns in the summer afternoons, and sift its colors from tangled lillies and gravel in late Autumn.
On a recent aftrnoon the light fell in such a way that it looked like this, like a cliff, and an abyss, and a refuge, that crack in Leonard Cohen’s wonderful bell, the dark and somber and jubilant Anthem:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
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