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You are here: Home / Uncategorized / About This Blog

About This Blog

May 7, 2017 by Iskra 2 Comments

The writing desk, a journal life

With wild mind, you live with the whole sky. It’s very different from the idea of a muse, which is something outside yourself that appears and magically helps you.–Natalie Goldberg

I am a multi-disciplinary artist, and I find that writing and image making are part of the same river, equal currents flowing between each other in the creative process. Words and images flood seemingly randomly through my life and land on the blackboard, in notebooks and pressed on the very dense altar of the refrigerator door, waiting for the organizing principle to emerge. I never know which side of my brain will spark connections and set in motion a series of work or an idea. I spent many years studying writing based on Natalie Goldberg’s wonderful books and inspiration and working in the direction of fiction. These days I find myself leaning towards the essay and the prose poem. This blog is a place where I share my life-long knitting project of words, pictures, culture, connections and recollection. I work in many media, but am currently focused on photography, drawing, printmaking and collage. Here I post recent work and ideas in progress as well as art news and notices of events and shows. To keep up on the latest please subscribe at this link, where  you may customize your preferences for newsletter, blog or both.

I love to meet creative people, and my blog is also a vehicle for artist interviews and reviews of other peoples’ work. The practice of art can be very solitary, and one of my primary goals is to connect people of similar interests who might be great neighbors if they were only across the alley instead of a freeway or a continent apart. The web allows us to create our own zipcode, filled with prayer flags and toppled picket fences, crossable in a second.

In the sidebar under Artist Studio Visits you will find the occasional interview with contemplative artists coming out of the Buddhist and other spiritual traditions. I have had a meditation practice for many years, and my own roots are in the Northwest mystic tradition, strongly influenced by Buddhist art. We live in an age marked by ideological warfare and spiritual shrinkage. I am interested in the opposite: in a world of generosity, inquiry and contemplative depth.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artists who write, blogs about artists, blogs about the creative process, contemplative art, natalie goldberg

Comments

  1. Beth Reiter says

    August 7, 2012 at 4:57 pm

    Iskra,

    This is such a lovely and loving post. Thank you for your words and thoughts. ~Beth

    Reply
  2. Chris Gedye says

    August 7, 2012 at 5:23 pm

    I do love your posts, Iskra. You are a lovely writer, and prolific. Thank you for your generosity!

    Reply

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

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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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