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You are here: Home / Architecture & Sense of Place / Construction/Reconstruction / Construction Site Study, July 9

Construction Site Study, July 9

July 11, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Site-2-Construction-Site-Photograph — Site Study, 7:25, July 9

Filed Under: Construction/Reconstruction, Photography Tagged With: art about construction, construction site photography, photograph of a construction site

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Friday night: the world has a new equator: on one

Friday night: the world has a new equator: on one side are those who “read the news” and on the other are those who are miraculously focused on the pizza just ordered, the stock price not yet imploded, the watering can and the geranium: an idea of continuity that is so deep it supersedes privacy settings or the need for them.
It’s Friday night here, as I said, in that other world among those who do read the news. We notice that the US postal service is up next for dismemberment (#unkind) and that Etsy (artists! Shops! Shipping!) will be so over by March. We notice the curious dismissal of the military (#nonessential), we think about patriotism and flags (#soover) and find it hard to breathe.

This is when, weirdly, the Washington Post comes to the rescue with not, “art criticism”, but with a portal to history, meaning, and the desperately needed smelling salts of the Romantic Era. Portals to an alternate view much needed here:)) Also: (if you trust the FAA,) who wants to fly to NYC for a weekend to see the Met?

Tonight, after absorbing so much news of the coup

Tonight, after absorbing so much news of the coup (the postal service is being deleted— goodbye Etsy🥲) I am taking time to be in time with stacks of books on painting. The first page is a beautiful quote of process notes from @RebeccaCrowell from her mesmerizing book on cold wax medium. (The paintings are mine.) @stephanie.dalton.cowan introduced me to this wonderful world of surface intrigue and pigment subtleties, layers and layers of trial, error, intention, erasure and obfuscation. I cannot work in this medium due to its toxicity, but I cross train, learning what I can apply with acrylic and water. The work is so moody, and pigmented and rich. Hello Etruscans, now I begin to understand the art of the #fayumportraits. What I love about the quote from Rebecca is the embrace of the revisions. Pentimento, mystery, depth— it’s entirely the art of revision. Understood as a dance between doubt, acceptance and equilibrium. I painted 40 postage stamp landscapes today. An exercise in memory, scale and phenomena. The land is large, the window is small. Mail it, while there is still a postal service. . .
Can you imagine a United States without stamps, envelopes, mailboxes or #themail???

Creation Myths: they said everything was done in s

Creation Myths: they said everything was done in seven days. It must have been a very long day to mix all the colors. At this point, the telephone pole had not even been invented, much less the car, the fender or the particular kind of mud that sprays up from the road, tinted with rubber particulates and the rainbow leakage of fossil fuels. There would have first been the color of the original, and then the color of the fossil— and so many eons in between! How many hours do you suppose were spent looking up at a sky, deciding it was too blue and adding white for clouds, darkening the clouds with rain, inventing chandeliers and the prisms they cast and then puzzling over exactly how do you paint a rainbow? My daily practice involves long journeys in search of the colors, and every day the world looks different as I see more. Today I have an assignation with the goddess Phthalo. She wears velvet kimonos and walks along the edges of ponds. You can see her at dusk and in early morning.

Some painting notes: to keep my psychic sanity at

Some painting notes: to keep my psychic sanity at night I am watching as much of The Crown as I can before my eyes give out at midnight. Going back to England anytime in the last hundred years seems like a vacation, compared to the mess of the country formerly known as the USA, now being disassembled and sold off for parts. Bonus points, the scene with Winston Churchill and Graham Sutherland when Sutherland paints Churchill‘s portrait and they discuss art and trauma and the nature of what it is to be alive and witness oneself change through loss. Perhaps one of the most profound and original moments in contemporary drama. Also, an unexpected painting lesson from Churchill.

I have pulled out my many postcards gathered at Kettles Yard and the Tate, and I’m thinking about the murky, muddy tempera surfaces of the 40s and 50s and how they echo the low-contrast evening light in eastern Washington as well as the interior ambiance of a British drawing room at dusk, before someone turns on the chandeliers. On my journeys with a dear friend through the landscapes of Tieton and Naches I was always fascinated by what I call “the attenuated structure in the field.” As a photographic artist, I am now banging my head against my palette, taking the first steps to acknowledge that I have no idea how to paint what I see in paint rather than with photography.

In the end, it is always human limitation, and the paint itself, that has the last word. I now wish I had stopped and not filled in the roof. The paint had created a lightless, dim, low contrast environment, in which the structure was theoretical, not real. The photograph said the roof was dark and the light dimensional. But after multiple color and value trials, each painted over, I couldn’t find it. Don’t you hate that moment, when you don’t know “what color goes here???” Churchill agrees on this. I should have left the roof transparent.

Glimpses from the studio.

Glimpses from the studio.

Object lessons: the valentine💕 I hear this week

Object lessons: the valentine💕
I hear this week is devoted to Saint Valentine. Amid the toxic vitriol of our political bonfires romance still whispers below the fold. I had forgotten all about this until I stepped into Trader Joe’s and saw the succulents in the pink ceramic heart. The minute I saw them I felt a sweetness in the air, and a great calm. I looked at the scalloped edges of the planter and said to myself, I am not the kind of person who buys such a thing. That shade of pink. Someone who had this in their house would be named Gladys or Edna or Myrtle, and she would wear a velvet hat held in place with pins. I walked my little succulent heart to the cash register and I said to the young man with hair down to his shoulders, if I buy this I have to change my name to Gladys.

He gave me a blank look.
Edna?
He made that gesture of something going right over his head and smiled expectantly.

And so I had to explain in the 90 seconds I had before the next shopping cart rolled up what it meant to grow up in an era of women with those names, their propriety, their resolute knowledge of how to organize a life by chapter and verse, their polished black pumps tapping the street named Main Street, the stores that actually had store fronts. My father had a newspaper on the corner of just such a Main Street, and his secretary was named Myrtle. Every morning she came in and dusted the jade plant that sat in the corner window as the sun stole over the mountains and slanted across the walls. She had that moment each day before the men in green visors arrived and began setting type for the headlines of the week and the silence was shattered by the clatter of typewriters and lead slugs falling to the floor. She would have kept African violets on her windowsills, and when no one was looking she went through a pack of Marlboros every day, and hid the ashtrays under the sink. She’s my girl, I said to the young man at Trader Joe’s. And then I carried my Valentine very carefully to my car.

This week tell every one you meet you love them, in some unexpected way. And remember to love yourself, whatever your name is.

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