Iskra Fine Art

  • Prints
    • The Tarmac Residency: Airport Landscapes
    • Ink Painting Abstractions
    • Immersions | At The Shore
    • ColorBath: Images of the Harbor
    • The Floating World
    • Industrial Strength | Urban Industrial Landscape
    • The Scaffold
    • Industrial Pastorale: The Rural/Urban Landscape
    • Botanical Prints | The Natural World
    • Construction | Reconstruction : Urban Landscape
    • Infrastructure
  • Drawings
    • Pencil Drawings: Pandemic Pause
    • Drawings in Dust 1
    • Signs & Symbols (Archive)
    • Botanical Drawings (Archive)
  • Photography
    • Seattle Waterfront Park Photography
    • Architectural Photography | Construction Sites
    • American West Landscape Photography
  • Mixed Media
    • Modern Botanical | Mixed Media on Plaster
    • From the Sea | Water Paintings
    • Sleep Studies
  • Journals
    • Wayfinding Journal (Archive)
  • Shop
  • About
    • Contact
  • Blog
You are here: Home / Archives for cranes on Waterfront

Cranes in the Mist: A Visual Homage to Terminal 46

February 5, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

The Port Morning

The Port, Morning, Digital Mixed Media Collage, 20″ x 27″

This piece from the new series in progress on Infrastructure is an appreciation of the cranes at Terminal 46 at the Port of Seattle. I took a photo with my phone in terrible lighting from the ferry as I was heading to Bainbridge Island. The very terribleness turned out to be exactly what I was looking for when I started working, although it took awhile for me to figure that out. I was drawn first to the collision of atmosphere and industry, and the elegiac sense of voyage and retrospect that the view from the ferry inspires. Then I fought for several weeks as I visited and revisited the image — fought with the very ‘industrialness’ that I loved in the first glimpse — exactly how bright do you want the floodlights to be anyway?? Aren’t those lights just basically ugly compared to the Rosy Dawn and the Dusky Gloaming? Along the way I have been learning a lot about what I’m actually looking at. (For instance, here you will learn everything you’ve ever wondered about the Terminal 46 lighting retrofit, and “foot candles” and pick up the term “light trespass.”) Embedded in this image are the textures of place collected from the Terminal and its surroundings.

The terminals are a place at the heart of recent controversies. The Port has pushed back on a proposal for a new third stadium in SODO, questioning the effect of yet another sports arena on the ability of the Port to get its trucks and trains through traffic. Simultaneously, coal trains could be coming soon if the coal port is approved at Cherry Point, with as many as 18 additional trains a day passing through the waterfront area and adding an estimated 90 minutes of traffic delays to an already congested area. If you would like to participate in what is sure to be a rousing civic event you may want to attend the panel discussion on the coal train proposal coming up at Town Hall on February 13th.

It is easy, if you are not a longshoreman or employed at the Port, to take the waterfront and a humming industrial infrastructure for granted. But as I did more research on Seattle’s maritime industry I came across remarkable stories and archival photographs documenting a history of upheaval. The site where crane number 54 sits once hosted Seattle’s own Hooverville. Between 1931 and 1941 over a thousand men called this home, living in a state of what a sociology student of the time termed “insane disorder.” This fascinating site documenting the Great Depression in Seattle tells the story. I stumbled across a fabulous image bank when I entered “Skinner and Eddy Shipyard 1918” in google. The link is too long to accurately place, but if you go to the image search you will find a trove of historical photographs of the waterfront, several of which have the epic quality of the opening scene of “Les Miserables.” The Port of Seattle website shows fascinating glimpses of the brutal labor history of our state with a portrait of Terminal 91 and The Battle of Smith Cove. WTO was just one in a long history of eruptions and disruptions. In spite of the Northwest’s stupefying natural beauty the people don’t seem to be pacified by it, and they don’t take social and economic change lying down.

Art that is about sense of place is inevitably also about history. If you capture place you enter a field of echoes.  The thousands of accumulated abrasions, erasures, collisions, decisions, accidents and intentions, the changing weather of time’s passage, is embedded in everything you see. This is close cousin to “patina,” and you can find the loveliness of surface imperfection mass manufactured at Pottery Barn or the aptly named Pier 1. But it is also real, and it is everywhere around us in what is useful and working and necessary. It is a door into time.

Duwamish 2
Duwamish 2, Mixed Media Digital Collage, 30″ x 22

This morning I delivered a set of new large prints to the Seattle Art Museum Gallery, including “The Port” above. The framed prints range from 32 x 40 to slightly smaller, and will be up at the gallery in the next few days. In printing larger pieces it has been a wonderful experience to work with The Color Group. The ink on the new Canon 9400 has really breath-taking vibrance, and particularly on Hahnemuhle German Etching this printer takes the medium beyond what I’ve seen before, with a unique blending of surface qualities similar to silkscreen or traditional lithography. I hope you will stop in to see the work in person. *Update: the work seems to be flying out the door, so go soon! These are editions of 20 so if a piece is gone that you like you can contact me about additional prints. The Pale Cranes might be my favorite, and it went out before it even got up on the wall.

Filed Under: Prints Tagged With: atmosphere and industry, cranes in the mist, cranes on Waterfront, mixed media print of infrastructure, Port of Seattle, seattle maritime history, Terminal 46

Join Iskra’s Mailing List

Don't miss a thing! Subscribe to receive show announcements, first peek at new work and my semi-monthly blog by email. I primarily use the blog for news and updates but by signing up you will also receive the occasional newsletter and special offers for items in my shop.

Iskra Fine Art Blog

the creative process | conversations with artists | the contemplative impulse in art

Instagram

Sunday studies of motion and emotion. I’ve been Sunday studies of motion and emotion. I’ve been in an obstinately “unproductive” space this past week, but used my time well. Motion: I went swimming for the first time in 5 years; in the autumn’s holy light, the lake is a sacrament. Emotion: I watched three years of The Split in four days. Cried my eyes out. In awe of acting and a script this good. Sometimes you just have to take a vacation from yourself and let other people do life for you. On Hulu, BBC possibly the best relationship drama I have seen.
I’ve written a wild-mind sort of blog post in wh I’ve written a wild-mind sort of blog post in which I let the story of place, museums, witness and culture unfold as it wishes. It’s an old-style post before I had “newsletter consciousness.” (Sigh….when you send out a post with one image and a show announcement and maybe five more words and someone writes, “perfect length to view on my phone” you may be tempted to perform more of the same and forget the original muse, born long before success was judged by how well thoughts fit within 2x5” square inches. A few excerpts here and first link in bio to read the entirety. Witness and elegy is where I seem to live. Painting is acrylic ink on panel, a piece I have yet to resolve but like to see into for the next step.
If you are born on 9.11 take back this day. It’s If you are born on 9.11 take back this day. It’s still yours! Yesterday I started early and went to an island in the middle of the blue sea to be in beauty and celebrate life. As we walked the beach we met a young boy also born on 9.11. His parents had brought him to Vashon for the same reason, and he had found a perfect moon shell for his own birthday present sent from the sea. It was such a lovely moment, to remember the world is young no matter how old we are.
Taking the last golden days of summer for study. T Taking the last golden days of summer for study. The Volunteer Park museum has an exhibit showing the influence of the Edo arts in Japan on Toulouse-Lautrec and I went to see it last weekend. As you can see from these images, I seem to have no interest in Lautrec— True! But these details of woodcuts and paintings on silk fill me with a quiet rapture.
Walking Meditation Walking Meditation
RIP Brian McBride, The Stars of the Lid RIP Brian McBride, The Stars of the Lid

Featured Posts

  • How to Purchase Artwork from Iskra Fine Art
  • About This Blog
  • New Directions in Contemplative Art: Conversations with Artists
  • What is a Transfer Print? (Artist Statement)

Categories

  • Abstract Calligraphy
  • Airport Landscapes
  • Architecture & Sense of Place
  • Art Reviews
  • Art Sales
  • Artist Studio Visits
    • The Mystic Muse: Artists Working in the Contemplative Traditions
  • botanical art
  • Botanical Art Cards
  • Collage
  • Construction/Reconstruction
  • Digital Collage
  • Drawing
  • Essays
  • Featured Post
  • Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past
  • Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals
  • Iskra Writing on Medium
  • Living With Art
  • Meditation & Buddhism
  • Mixed Media
  • Music
  • Object Lessons: Essays and images inspired by "A History of the World in 100 Objects."
  • Painting
  • Photocollage
  • Photography
    • American West Landscape Photography
  • Poems
  • Print Sale
  • Prints
  • Recent Posts
  • Road Trips
  • Social Media for Artists
  • The 100 Day Projects
  • The Alaska Way Viaduct
  • The Garden
  • The Gardener's Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena
  • The Spiritual in Art
  • The Street
  • the Tarmac Residency
  • The Water Tower Project
  • Transfer Prints
  • Travel
  • Uncategorized
  • Watercolors

Archives

Search

Connect on Facebook

Iskra Fine Art Facebook Page

Creative Inspiration

  • Alternative Photography
  • An Artist's Retreat
  • Anonymous Chinese Textile Genius: Moo Won
  • Chocolate Is A Verb
  • Contemplative Art Process: Danila Rumold
  • Eva Isaksen
  • Old Industrial Japan
  • The Altered Page
  • The Heart Sutra Loop
  • The Patra Passage

Galleries for Contemplative Art

  • ArtXchange Gallery
  • Seattle Asian Art Museum

Links

  • CollageArt.org
  • Iskra at SAM Gallery
  • Iskra Fine Art on Houzz
  • Seattle Art Museum Blog
  • Seattle Artist League
  • Seattle Print Arts
  • Seeing Fresh: Contemplative Photography
  • The Painter's Keys

What I'm Reading: Online Magazines and Books I Love

  • 16 mi.
  • Essays by David Whyte
  • Evening Will Come: Poetry
  • Hyperallergic
  • Painter's Table
  • Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art
  • Streetsy
  • The Original Van Gogh's Ear Anthology
  • Tricycle Magazine
  • Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty
  • Vanguard

Let’s Connect

  • Contact Iskra
  • How to purchase artwork
  • Iskra Fine Art Blog : The creative process, conversations with artists, the contemplative impulse in art

Join Iskra’s Mailing List

Don't miss a thing! Subscribe to receive show announcements, first peek at new work and my semi-monthly blog by email. I primarily use the blog for news and updates but by signing up you will also receive the occasional newsletter and special offers for items in my shop.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

All Images Copyright © 2023  Iskra Johnson · Site by LND · WordPress