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February 23, 2020 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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Iskra Fine Art Blog

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

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Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the sol

Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the solitude of taking in a place with every one of our senses, unmitigated by the relational bypass legislated by the need to tend to whether the Other is: okay/happy/comfortable/entertained etc…? Tonight I’m sharing notes on my (new) dedicated weekly visit to the travel state of mind, in which I go somewhere in public as though I was a tourist and read and write and armchair travel.

I love company, don’t get me wrong. I have traveled with, and without. Evenings are not always at ease. In 1990 I went to a Typography Conference in Oxford. Dropped my luggage a week ahead and took a train to the Lakes. Me and every honeymooning couple of the year, in 19th century bed and breakfasts (all booked by pre-internet postal and phone call.) Horsehair mattresses, pineapple-carved bedposts. Two other non-honeymooning people were allowed into the 40-mile square Lakes that month. They did not make eye contact.

So it was me and Beatrix Potter, and the “jacket potato”, an unfortunate menu staple that involved baked beans + baked potatoes (in far too close proximity) alone with our observations writing letters home to whichever boyfriend it was left behind. (Here I gracefully omit the grand ball under the tent on the Thames back at the conference and everything that happened after. . .) The Thames is why the British invented elipses.

I had told myself on some errant Tuesday that England was the size of Whidbey Island. It was a rare lapse, in which I completely forgot: world history? Oh, wait, the Beatles. + King Arthur. Stones and tables and swords. Forgive me while I go re-watch the intro to #Outlander….

Daunting to study the guidebook and realize I should have started this project when I was 11. I have been to England three times. I cannot fathom how I thought I could go again and not want to see everything: every cathedral, flea market, moody moor, outsider mural and Arabic bakery, cinematically filtered through a modern mashup of Virginia Woolf and Peaky Blinders.

Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I fi

Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I find myself sometimes seeking very simple places to land. What better place to land then water? In the series of architectural works in progress one of my subjects is the Chittenden Locks. You can’t have the locks without the water that lives to be raised and lowered. These subtle tethers between invisible guide posts and unseen actors offstage speak to me not just of infrastructure and industry, but of our connections to one another.

I live in a city that has decided resolutely that Zoom is the same as actual conversation. The model embraced here is “if it looks good, as a facsimile, it’s probably good enough.” What a loss for all of those who have spent a lifetime in a craft perfecting real things. Serif, proportion, texture, text— all made visible through touch. One tug of a rope, one breath of wind, and this whole image redesigns itself. With photographic art I can make images without ever smearing paint or lifting out. I touch with my eyes and mind. What makes it human is metaphor. What keeps you tethered to this world, and to others?

Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and archi

Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and architecture. This piece harkens to another time. Old world rotogravure, lithography, the specimen studies of explorers first seeing the tropics, or the to-them “new world.” Also to the early psychedelic history of Seattle, where if your UW professor was missing in class he might be sitting in one of the mythic cedars at Volunteer Park, or cactus gazing in the steamy other-world of the conservatory. It was a magical time, and the park was the incandescent center.

The way I work is by deconstructing the real into many subtle layers of color and tint and tone, and then recomposing as though each piece of photographic information was a plate. In my architectural images and botanical work a piece like this can go back-and-forth for a long time between realism and atmosphere and I never know until the very last step exactly where it will land.

Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by

Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by candlelight.

Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta

Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions:

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?

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…

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