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Iskra Johnson_ Artist_Resume_8-2015

August 3, 2015 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Iskra Johnson_ Artist_Resume_8-2015

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Time to focus. See you in a week. . .

Time to focus. See you in a week. . .

I’m having a hard time focusing today. Thinking

I’m having a hard time focusing today. Thinking of a phone booth in Studio City where I would make appointments with design studios, a month walking the boardwalk in Santa Monica, reading the LA Times on the beach and watching old men play bocci, the eucalyptus canyons, the tropical garden at the Langham in Pasadena, the pool in Tarzana, that honeymoon drive along the Pacific Coast Highway where I left my pillow at a hotel with goats up in the hills . . . So many friends and memories in LA. Heartsick. The devastation is beyond comprehension. Sending prayers to my friends evacuated or driving out. The little victories of the studio seem pale and inconsequential right now. Above, a ruin in Hilo, and an imaginary landscape, from Drawings in Dust.

The first rescue operation of the new year. Sanded

The first rescue operation of the new year. Sanded and destroyed a painting from 2 years ago and started again, thinking of semi opacity and veils rather than of a representation. It’s still an object in the field, but inching closer to paint. With the battleship skies of these days and January’s chill I have been craving warm white. No music in the studio, just the quiet.

5 hours of sorting bills left, and I took a break

5 hours of sorting bills left, and I took a break to throw out ancient correspondence. So glad I rescued this from the trash: a moment of existential meltdown the year I was finishing my BFA. Intention for 2025 underlined: emotion, freedom, expression.

Last night I sat with a friend at the kitchen tabl

Last night I sat with a friend at the kitchen table, in a ceremony to shape the story of the year past and the year to come. Tangerines, mochi and tea, candles to warm the light and help to shape a vaporous not-yet built future from our irresolute selves. She is considering leaving a house and a life of 33 years, I am more fully looking to own the life I have. We could learn much from the mollusks and the hermit crabs. It is hard to leave the shell of a house that no longer fits when a new one has not yet been found. Perhaps we needed candlelit moon shells, with their romantic arabesques, to thoroughly walk us into the space of new places made vacant and filled with possibility.

We wrote our intentions to invite and to abandon on two sides of a piece of paper and then tried to fold it into a boat. A British woman on Youtube gave directions, her words crisp as baking parchment. A paper boat: the simplest origami in the world. My friend’s came out fine, mine fell into a labyrinth of misdirection, a cross between a crushed lotus and a lizard, though it did catch fire later more easily, having many loose parts and stray corners to catch flame.

In my chagrin at my (7?) simple folds having been done incorrectly I remembered another holiday: a dark Wednesday afternoon in the Third Grade portables at Madrona Elementary. Our project was to understand the Felt Experience™️ of The Pilgrims & The Indians, in part by making a longhouse out of brown construction paper. I tried. I promise you I tried. All ardent impulses towards Geometry devolved into something structurally insupportable, and the teacher paused beside my desk, waited an interminable beat, and lifted my construction into the air for the entire class to behold. “This girl,” she said, “did not follow directions.” What ARE the instructions for the new year? You can say it is arbitrary, this naming of a particular day “Day 1”; you can say, I’ll declare my own, thank you very much, perhaps make it the end of Wassail, or just after Easter, when bunnygrass is on sale, or maybe after Mayday, when the bluebells have wilted and there are no excuses left. But I have believed in the power of January my whole life.

Instagram post 18073650007654387

Instagram post 18073650007654387

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