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New Years Eve 2025: The Intentions Ritual

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Origami Intentions, New Years 2025
 
New Years Eve 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.

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The Color of the Year is Nostalgia: Happy New Year, Hello 2025

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Be Happy Poster

The design authorities have nominated “Mocha Mousse” as the color of the year, suggesting to me that either The Onion has taken over, or the members of The Color Board need to up their anti-depressants.  A color of “subtle elegance and sensorial richness?” Think again: perhaps of global warming and how the coffee bean so many of us rely on for optimism is rapidly becoming extinct. Sorry! Mocha Mousse is about pillows! Beige linen against a gray couch, and wall paint that costs $95 per gallon. Neutrals and browns are hard, I get it. I’m sure it takes a full year to get the shades just right.

However. Looking forward to 2025, from a city often drenched in dispiriting shades of mud, I nominate the Color of the Year as Nostalgia. I just can’t, right now, look into the future. I need to rest in the soft duotones and bad color separations of childhood. Toys were tin, cotton had not yet been invaded by plastic, the inside of a sleeping bag was 100% flannel, smelling of Irish setters and woodsmoke. Who wouldn’t want to live there again?

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Celebrate the Beauty of Swans: Holiday Print Sale, Twenty Percent off!

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Navigation ©Iskra Johnson

A big thank you to the friends and collectors who came out to my open studio and party November 16th! You made the year a great one, and work continues to go out the door, as those who could not make the open house stop by to visit. There were many requests for the swans to appear as cards, and as promised, they are now live, in The Swans Suite in my shop. All of the works are available as larger prints as well. A few of the swans are available only as larger prints. I may make a second Swans stationary collection as time goes on.

As a holiday thank you I am offering a 20% discount in my shop from now through the Solstice. If you have had your eye on a larger piece this is your chance to save big on any purchase over $150, cards excluded. Enter SOLSTICE24 at check out.

A note on upcoming price increases: Due to the inflation of costs for ink, paper and postage, I will be raising prices to catch up next year. This is one of your last chances to purchase cards at the current rate of 6 for $33

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New Photographic Art from England

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Blue Swan on the River Wensum Swan in garland of branches
Blue Swan (The River Wensum)  ©Iskra Johnson
 
I have been home from England just over a month, and I am still in a state of wonder and dislocation. Thirty perfect days abroad, and now – insert quandary emoticon– normal life. This post will share a few first highlights of the trip and a glimpse of new work, more of which can be seen in this portfolio under Photography. 
 

I had many reasons for making the journey to England, after 30 years away. Any one of the reasons is a novella, which is why I am thinking of creating a new blog devoted to travel. Where to even begin? Perhaps with the question posed last week by friends who had just returned from Scandinavia and Prague: why England? To which I replied: The Wind in the Willows. That classic children’s book about Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad and their bucolic life along the river shaped my idea from the age of 6 of what countryside should look like. I was a child of the wide open west, where barbed wire and naked fenceposts divided the fields, you could drown in the murky depths of a horse trough, and a volcanic mountain filled the eastern door of the barn. Our river was a quarter mile down a steep cliff littered with rusted barrels and stalked by coyotes and mountain lions. 
 
My father gave me the Wind in the Willows when I entered 1st grade. I would sit in bed in the farmhouse and run my fingers over the illustrated endpapers, tracing a green quilt of soft hedgerows, a river you could easily row a boat down, a tiny bridge, a weir, and Pan’s Island, where, in Chapter 7, Rat, Mole, (and every susceptible child) could be awed by The Mystery. Page 133 still holds a four leaf clover and the browned paper on which I wrote out Rat’s failed attempt to describe, in words, the wordless presence of god. So yeah, I went to England to find that. It may explain why I could not stop following the swans. (Click on any print image to see details in shop.)

White Swan on the Avon River fine art print
White Swan on the Avon ©Iskra Johnson

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Iskra Summer Shows 2024

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Looking At You, mixed process print, variable sizes, © Iskra Johnson

I’ve just dropped new work off at SAM Gallery for the upcoming show, “Splash!” opening August 10, from 2-4 PM. Work from my Immersions series will be included with water-inspired works from SAM Gallery artists Cara Jaye, Joe Max Emminger, Andy Eccleshall and Kate Protage. 

While I am in England a show based on Seattle landscape featuring four of my industrial and maritime works will open at Chatwin Arts. Keep your eye on their Instagram for the opening!

Eventide, © Iskra Johnson

Downtown was beautiful this morning. Trucks roared, dumpsters clanged, fish flew and tourists flocked the waterfront. Shifting double exposures refracted from windows in the sky. Pigeons! There is a palpable excitement this week as Seattle Art Fair opens and greets the art spirit.

When I got home there was a note from Seattle Office of Arts and Culture about Hope Corps. I’m sharing it here, in hopes you will respond or pass it along. This is a promising sign of new opportunities for artists in the city:

The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture (ARTS) invites individual artists, cultural producers, arts administrators, creative workers, community groups, and arts and cultural organizations to apply to Hope Corps.

You can apply by proposing projects that generate career opportunities for the local creative workforce, and contribute to the well-being of Seattle’s downtown community with community-driven projects, events, performances, and more.

Envisioned as an economic recovery program for Seattle’s creative workforce, Hope Corps connects under- and unemployed artists, creative workers, and culture keepers with career opportunities that benefit the public. The 2025 Hope Corps program is part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan, and funding will go towards projects that employ creative workers through activations in Seattle’s downtown neighborhoods:

Belltown, Central Downtown, Chinatown-International District, Denny Triangle, Pioneer Square, Stadium District.

Proposed projects should be unique events or activations, taking place in 2025 in street-level, accessible, outdoor or otherwise publicly visible spaces that provide engaging experiences for the public and bring audiences downtown.

Grants range from $5,000 – $50,000 to support creative worker wages and project expenses.

If you do nothing else in the next few days, do go swimming! And if you aren’t at the lake, see you at the Art Fair…

The Sailboat New Media by Iskra

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