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You are here: Home / Archives for hydrant silkscreen

Silkscreen Experiment 1: The Hydrant

May 26, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

SilkscreenAndDigitalHydrantPrint
© Iskra Johnson

I am fascinated by all the ways you can do silkscreen wrong. You spend several hours preparing and burning a screen and then in a fit of complete stupidity you reach for a bottle of “something” and spray the screen and the “something” turns out to be…. emulsion remover. (It does, in fact, say something about emulsion on the bottle, you just don’t bother to notice the word “remover.”) Before completely throwing up my hands in frustration I sprayed the screen with water, and lo, it turned out I had a very interesting mistake on my hands.

I came home from the print studio at Pratt, (where I am in theory learning “how-to”), and threw some ink in a tray and started wildly printing. Or painting. I am not sure which this is, and am happy not to. Why hydrants, you might ask? I don’t, actually, I just follow them, as if led inexorably by a leash.

But there is this business of artist “statements” and knowing why it is you do what you do. I was talking with a friend and collaborator yesterday about obsessions, and his currently is dams. Yes, he will drive 300miles to find a small obscure dam in order to document its existence. The common theme here is water, and the majesty of infrastructure. As the world teeters bit by bit I do love a piece of metal I cannot lift, put together with a flawless arrangement of bolts and screwplates and circles and cones in a way handed down through hundreds of years from men with rough hands and wrenches. Not only are these articles of urban engineering marvels to look at, but we depend on them to spew water where we want it and to keep it under the ground when we don’t. I imagine a huge force under the earth, the water always there with many-headed ferocity, and only the stalwart little hydrant to keep it in check. I have my own brilliant yellow hydrant in front of my house, and it makes me happy every time I come home and see it there, surrounded by equally yellow dandelions. I feel safe.

HydrantsInBlueSilkscreen
Hydrants in Blue, silkscreen © Iskra Johnson

This last one is technically silkscreen and digital but in describing it I am being optimistic. I have not yet dared to print the actual blue tint in silkscreen across the top and am testing colors in Photoshop before I jump to the screen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: city images silkscreen, digital and silkscreen combinations, hydrant silkscreen, silkscreen

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I am getting ready to start a new photographic-bas I am getting ready to start a new photographic-based series that I’ll be working on for the next six months. A friend here on Instagram gave me these praying hands years and years ago. They are quietly gaudy, and awful and simultaneously completely wonderful. I see them every day when I wake up in a house that I will confess is filled with devotional objects. This image is composed of two photographs, the sculpture and a street kiosk. When I walk down the streets, I cannot resist documenting kiosks, particularly when they are empty. The shredded strange paint residues and the battered metal frames are just waiting to be re-purposed as though the entire street was my personal goodwill junk department. Or you could call it a library. My cross training for the series is reading Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness, novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s writing gives an artist permission to own their interior world. Of course, letting the exterior world in on the secret can be quite a task. That is, what studio time is for…
I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendsh I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendship, even when they are asymmetric; for the guidance of those in the temple, who have practiced for years and send us their notes and their breathing lessons; thankful for the leaf that my friend saved for me of all the leaves in her neighborhood and thankful to the man who came yesterday when my back had laid me flat to sweep and to blow, as he noted in his documentation, 95% of the leaves in my garden, into piles then compressed with military precision into small liftable bundles stacked like muffins under the eaves. Now we can look out at the spare empty spaces. Feel the freedom of silence and space between branches. Rest, as growth goes quiet and invisible in the best growing season of the year.

May your Thanksgiving be bright✨
Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Art Museum First Avenue level, 2-4! Hope to see you there for our group show celebrating 50 years(!) This piece is called Water Kimono, a reverie on the ever-changing patterns of light on water.
My Narnia My Narnia
Last night I tried to get through more than 20 min Last night I tried to get through more than 20 minutes of the Golden Bachelor. It was Pickleball-date afternoon. The Golden Bachelor, truly a lovely man to observe and listen to under normal circumstances delivered this line: “Pickleball is a regular part of my life. Any woman who is going to share my life must also share Pickleball.” 

God help us. I’ve never been able to hit a ball with a paddle or a sock or a bat or anything else. Combat sports, like music, are abstract. No matter how much I pre-visualize the zen moment, the ball somehow remains in the air unrelated to my weapon of choice. I want to see the next Golden Bachelor rewritten for painters. “He said, fingering the smear of cadmium on his eyebrow, “Painting is a very big part of my life, and any woman who marries me is going to have to live with Painting.” Will he also say “I hope she paints too?” And we’ll have a full time maid and cook? Or will he say “She must be able to bring me my pipe and my slipper at the end of the day. And take the dogs for long walks alone while I try to decide the color of the sky?”

Feel free to write the script below.
A time and memory experiment. Photography captures A time and memory experiment. Photography captures a moment in light. You put the moment away for 30 years, lose the album several times, and then it resurfaces, the old analog print in perfect form. What happens if the small print is then scanned and enlarged? And revisited as the half-forgotten? This image from Koyasan was printed small in the first run and did not look like much of anything. On 17 x 22 it is lovely, and at full size of 24 x 36 it is something else altogether. Unlike enlargements of digital photographs analog images are simply soft, without the artifacts of pixel interpolation. How curious that what was originally 4x6 looks best at least 400% larger.

Photography is such a powerful tool to explore memory and what it means to forget and remember. The idea that we must live authentically in the “Now” (or that there IS a “now” unfiltered by the past) is perplexing for a meaning seeker. I always have a memory, no matter how small and distant, crumpled in my back pocket. Perhaps like homeopathic tinctures the smaller the memory the more space it can fill.

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