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You are here: Home / Archives for Terminal 5 print

“Drive-By”: The Alaska Way Viaduct at the Golden Hour

July 2, 2013 by Iskra 1 Comment

One of Seattle’s soon to be lost treasures is the Alaskan Way Viaduct. I had my office next door to it for eight years and learned to love and hate its noise and dirt and it’s hulking and fundamental “in-the-way-ness.” However, when one is not eye level from an office window cursing the dust and noise but rather on it or driving right next to it, perhaps at the golden hour, there are few more intoxicating sights than the Port and the great cranes and Elliott Bay glimpsed between its pillars.

This view is now complicated with additional intrigue by the Big Dig. If you love structures and infrastructure and seeing the bones of things, this is the place to be. I have taken hundreds of cellphone pictures on the drives to West Seattle and back, and have begun a project using these images called, quite literally, “Drive-By.” I am using digital media combined with painting to create what feel to me very much like old fashioned monoprints. I made monoprints for years using oil based ink on zinc, and I love the technique. It is a wonderful challenge to use digital technology with the same sense of play and spontaneity, using masks and layer effects to “wipe” the plate, and to print plates (translated as Photoshop layers) over each other, with infinite ability to adjust density and color.

Photography and print making are ideal ways to capture the sense of time flashing, of the way reality exposes itself on the retina and how then memory overlays one image onto another, like tissue paper through which color and a sense of the sky bleed through. In this case of course it is not just memory but motion itself creating the layers.

Three glimpses:

Drive By At Dusk The Port arachival pigment print
“Drive-by at Dusk: Hanjin” archival pigment print © iskra Johnson
Drive By 2 The Port archival Print
“Drive-by 2,” archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson
Drive-By-In-Pink:Hanjin
“Drive-by in Pink,” archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson

Drive-By Day Two: Cellphone Transfer Prints

I have not made any transfer prints in awhile, and it occurred to me that it might be the next step for these images. Cell phone resolution can be frustratingly chunky when printed large, but the transfer process takes natural advantage of soft blurs and ambiguities, and these images lend themselves to a tactile surface and intimate scale. On these two I used Apollo transfer film on hot press watercolor with spray alcohol (92%). It’s counter-intuitive, but for some reason the temperature today in the studio, which nearly matched that of the alcohol, seemed to help the process along.

It feels wonderful to surrender to color. I fell in love with Maxfield Parrish’s clouds in a junk shop when I was in the sixth grade. Ash Grove Cement might as well be a neo-Greek column, and that shape in the middle could be a neo-nymph looking up in reverie at plumes of steam. Who says industry isn’t romantic? And who can resist a name like “Ash Grove?”

Ash Grove Cement (For Maxfield Parish) transfer print
“Ash Grove Cement, for Maxfield,” transfer print on watercolor paper 7″ x 7″ © Iskra Johnson

 

"To Avalon," transfer print on watercolor paper, 7" x 7", © Iskra Johnson
“To Avalon,” transfer print on watercolor paper, 7″ x 7″, © Iskra Johnson

 

Terminal 5
“Terminal 5 ,” © Iskra Johnson

(Not yet printed, but I thought I would include it here to show the surface difference between the native image and prints with similar imagery.)

See more artwork on industrial themes at the print portfolios for Construction/Reconstruction and Infrastructure.

Filed Under: Construction/Reconstruction, Photography, The Alaska Way Viaduct Tagged With: Alaska Way Viaduct art, Ash Grove Cement, cellphone art, drive-by photography, industrial art, Maxfield Parrish Clouds, memory in art, monprinting with a computer, printmaking and digital process, Terminal 5 print, the Big Dig, the golden hour

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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.”
First Thursday. Such a beautiful night. First Thursday. Such a beautiful night.

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