Dec 11, 2009 | Recent Posts, Signs I Like
Photographs © Ernest Hilsenberg
These two signs from Ernest Hilsenberg's recent travels in Costa Rica have everything I covet in a piece of art. Texture, mystery, distress, elegance. And instructions for what you can and cannot do. Look at the exquisitely wrong letter spacing between the u and the m, the caprice of the flourished N, the vapor of smoke. Not to mention the shimmering ghost of the silver cigarette and the restrained iconography for "no."
As for the billboard, who needs Photoshop when you have weather and wallpaper paste? The color palette is classic Russian Constructivist.
Nov 25, 2009 | Signs I Like
Here is a weather-appropriate sequence as we enter the Thanksgiving weekend. Sent to me by photographer John Kane, whose work I first encountered during Tieton Days in Mighty Tieton, Eastern Washington. You will see this classic emblem of accommodations communication on the road to Fordair just north of Coulee City.
You can see more of John's work at http://www.johnakane.com
Oct 23, 2009 | Recent Posts, Signs I Like
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Just below this sign there is a stair, and it leads down. I found it on an oddly balmy gray day in October, an almost eerily gray day when small differences in tone cried out for distinction. This discreet invitation to hell peeks out from the bleachers at the end of Greenlake, where athletes leap the Mayan-temple-sized stairs and below them rowers whistle for their boats.
Aug 21, 2009 | Recent Posts, Signs I Like
A prime example of nails and rust used as secondary visual element © Iskra Johnson 2009
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I think of August as a field of back-lit hay, as faded cornflowers and delphiniums swaying in the wind and giving up their last petals. It is a month of exhaustion. The dogs are tired. The flowers are tired. The people too are tired, and I think they go to Echo Lake to take a long nap. This wonderfully bleak sign hangs next to a while-you-wait denture office just south of the tattoo parlor and north of the Drift On Inn, where you can play poker with the last of your IRA or have the lettuce and a pickle lunch special on Thursdays. Why not do both, especially if you are on a fixed income.
Exactly what do these strange puzzle pieces indicate? Is that a cluster of houses on the upper right? Where is the Lake? Perhaps the whole point is to let my imagination improve on the situation. Perhaps better that I don't know the lake is behind the Costco, that just before putting on your goggles and diving under you can hear cars gunning at the discount gas and people fighting each other for a parking place, that you're never sure if that is a beer can or a woman's shoe glinting underwater.
As I took this photo wind chimes knocked together in the afternoon heat. Tucked into a broken downspout a bouquet of weeds tied in faded ribbon thanked me for stopping by.
Jul 29, 2009 | Found Alphabets & Street Poetry, Recent Posts, Signs I Like
From Aaron Zube, friend and collaborator in San Francisco. A universal symbol set that carries its message effectively in large, medium and small. I just want to know why there are no double scoops. Since San Francisco is experiencing winter fogs and clammy temperatures, this image sequence may have been utilized as part of a shamanistic ritual to reinstall the sun. Trade you Seattle's 101 degrees for whatever wistful autumnal breezes you've got down there!
Tonight someone set fire to an island in the middle of a little lake that the fire engines can't get to and as far as the eye can see the sky is filled with pink smoke. I found out the cause of the fire while having a jamocha ice cream cone at Baskin & Robbins…. For new prints on the theme of The Ice Cream Man, or "meditations on desire," see new work at Iskra Fine Art.
Designer, calligrapher, lettering artist. 