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You are here: Home / Mixed Media / New Directions with Italian Plaster

New Directions with Italian Plaster

September 17, 2015 by Iskra 1 Comment

After my inspirational time with Jennifer Carrasco I am diving into the new/old technique of Italian plaster and reveling in what happens when you let surface speak. In the past I’ve tended to get nervous when I spend a lot of time making a surface to paint or draw on. The calligrapher in me wants to have a stack of a hundred sheets of paper and nothing to lose by drowning in ink, again and again, and throwing whatever happens on the floor for later reflection. The word “precious” comes up when I think of sanding and painting and sanding again and then glazing and . . . then trying to put something down on such a huge investment of time.

If you are a recovering calligrapher or watercolorist you know this tyranny of the perfect sheet of rag paper. With a pristine sheet of BFK or $20 rice paper there is really nowhere to go but “down.” The difference with the plaster technique is that the surface is full of imperfection and invites more of the same – and I’m calling that beautiful. Every disaster can be resurrected and made into something new, with the added beauty of the previous layers coming through.  As someone once said to me as they observed my highly evolved forms of procrastination and avoidance, “We are all more human than otherwise.” So why not just get busy with being human.

That said, a few of these distressed surfaces are so compelling they give me pause, and it seems I will need to make a whole lot of them before I feel truly free to improvise.

Plaster etching by Iskra
Italian plaster with etching and glazes

When I prepare a surface I feel just like I do when I am wiping a traditional zinc plate for the printing press, the difference being that I can avoid the follies that happen when it gets transferred to paper. There are times when I love printing and can go with the flow of the transformations of the press, but more and more I am just plain in love with the plate itself. I think it’s the architecture element: it’s a real, solid thing. Speaking of architecture, I am continuing the theme of structures in some of this new work:

Form-study-on-plaster-Iskra-Fine-art

This is a miniature, all of 4 inches square, a test for something I plan to do large, but it’s pretty cute tiny.  On a road trip with my friend, the talented painter Patty Haller ,we passed a completely amazing construction site, and she said, we have to stop, right? Who could say no to this?? The best friendships come with a detour clause.

This one is an experiment with material from my trip down the Duwamish:

Duwamish Plaster Study Mixed media Iskra

All of this new work is a combination of image transfer, plaster and paint. The glazing materials I purchased from Stucco Italiano have a lovely two hour open time and for once I am not cursing acrylic – it can actually flow, and smear, and be rubbed off and layered again without those awful streaks that come from quick-drying mediums.

My other muse is nature. From the tangled garden at the end of summer:

 

Seed and shadow
Seeds and Shadow, mixed media on panel, © Iskra Johnson
Anemone-Botanical-on-plaster-iskra
Anemone, from The Gardener’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena, mixed media on panel © Iskra Johnson

The word “Almanac” has been on my mind, and it may be the framework of this new work. It was a brutal summer for anyone who has invested time and love and water in a garden. I am thinking of the old guides that could tell us the future with some flour-sack certainty, of a simpler world ruled by the moon and the occasional volcano, when the only news came from a neighbor, and when we would be spending these September days putting up fruit and tomatoes and burying our future in the root cellar for later celebration. These are my pages from the Almanac, that edition you can’t find in the Library of Congress; fragments found after the fire at the conservatory a long time ago.

 

The Burnt Angel, Volunteer Park Conservatory
The Burnt Angel, Capitol Hill Conservatory Fire, Seattle Washington

Stay tuned for news of the upcoming Seattle Sampling studio tour, where I will be offering a selection of this new work. All images © Iskra Johnson

Filed Under: Mixed Media, Transfer Prints Tagged With: anemone, botanical art, garden art, image transfer on panel, mixed media on panel, panel, plaster

Comments

  1. Ruth says

    September 18, 2015 at 6:52 pm

    I can’t wait to see these in person!

    Reply

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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.”
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