Iskra, Author at Iskra Fine Art

Iskra Summer Shows 2024

July 24, 2024 by Iskra Leave a Comment

*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!

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

Open Studio Tours: Creating Sustainable Ecosystems for the Arts

June 25, 2024 by Iskra 2 Comments

Creating a Sustainable Arts Ecosystem

The word “sustainability” is everpresent today in discussions of climate change and global warming. Less often do we hear it applied to the visual arts, which are themselves part of an ecosystem. Community support for the visual arts tends to be scattershot and fitful, reliant on the generosity of funding organizations and a handful of collectors (like Seattle’s departed Paul Allen) who, though much appreciated, can change their affections without warning or predictability. With state and local governments facing recurring deficits, arts funding is usually the last to be added and the first to be cut. Large ongoing grants from foundations most often go to established organizations like museums, theaters, schools and community associations; even if an artist competes successfully for the rare individual grant, these only fund a fraction of expenses and rarely provide ongoing support.

The path to success in art is rarely direct. Developing a meaningful body of work as an artist can require years of experimentation, skill building and detours into work that may not succeed financially but which is necessary to creative growth. For this process artists need time, a work space and opportunities to test their work in the marketplace. Artists need regular sales of their work and a growing collector base to thrive.

Today the web is increasingly accepted as the replacement for traditional art sales venues, with claims that social media and online shops make galleries obsolete. Granted, success has come to select superstars, but increasingly social media favors “influencers,” brand ambassadors and advertisers, and not actual artists, (AKA “content creators”). The algorithms of Instagram and Facebook surface primarily the minority who are already famous and successful, while offering less and less visibility to artists who need a reliable showcase where their work can connect to buyers. [Read more…]

Summer Solstice Flower Suite

June 20, 2024 by Iskra 2 Comments

Chiaroscuro of the Garden

The Summer Solstice is a day to revel in color and light. Only a few peonies bloom in my dappled shade, but for a week I live in the intoxication of their perfume. Placed with a stray branch of mock orange, the blaze of peony against the darkness of night seems like a Solstice anthem, holding all the mysteries of darkness and light. When I was a child I thought the longest day of summer was July 15^th, in the middle of those three calendar months I filled in with yellow crayons. The adult knows better. I could start brooding now about the coming darkness. Or I could take a walk in the garden . . .

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Seattle’s Iconic Landmarks: New Fine Art Print and Stationery Series

June 5, 2024 by Iskra Leave a Comment

*The Atlas of Memory, Iconic Landmarks of Seattle*

For the past few months I have been working on a series of prints and stationery brought to you by a new (somewhat fictional) entity called The Atlas of Memory. The Atlas is a repository for images of Seattle’s landmark buildings, parks, and iconic wonders that hold an enduring sense of place. You could say the Atlas is where I live and where I would like more people to dwell with me: in appreciation for the history of Seattle as a frontier town with all of its ungainly aspirations for the culture and grandeur of Europe and “The East” (ie. Chicago and New York.)

What remains of Seattle’s historic legacy is vanishingly small, and all the more important to preserve. My hope is that this series of works, which will eventually number a dozen or more, will encourage enthusiasts of rapid change and the transformation of Seattle into AnywhereUSA to pause, sit down on a bench or a boulder and just look. See what’s here. Study the history of this little outpost at the edge of the world. Think about how change might be accommodated in a way that does not just erase, but that brings history forward, maintaining the best of design and artisanship that created treasures like The Fox Theater (Music Hall), demolished in spite of years of preservationist efforts, in 1992.

My subjects will range from official landmarks like the the Volunteer Park Conservatory to the oversized kitsch of 1950’s signage to the left-over furniture of the World’s Fair. I take the Space Needle personally. It’s where my 6th grade class went, at graduation, for its first formal dinner. I wore green tennis shoes and a purple Nehru ensemble with pleated skirt. Some kid named Bob picked up chicken with sauce on it with his hands and ate it like a drumstick at a picnic. Hashtags had not yet been invented, but it was #etiquettefail. As I mentioned above, Seattle began as a frontier town . . .

The Smith Tower Limited Edition Print

*Smith Tower in Vintage Light ©Iskra Johnson*

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Thoughts on Sebastian Junger and Life After Death

May 29, 2024 by Iskra Leave a Comment

*Baroque Morning, printing ink and sgraffito on paper, ©Iskra Johnson*

An Evening at Town Hall in Seattle with Sebastian Junger

How long should the mood of Memorial Day last? It seems to have extended here past the weekend and the Monday holiday to Tuesday night, when I went to hear one of my heroes, war journalist Sebastian Junger, talk about near-death at Town Hall. His book, In My Time of Dying, is just out. I searched for reviews and was disappointed to find nearly identical 5-star summaries of content, 2-star disappointment from those seeking spiritual epiphany, and little else. A book like this is a contribution to our culture, crossing boundaries between the private and the public, between personal and professional, between atheism and belief, in ways that should, I hope, provoke far more meaningful reviews. That said, my thoughts here are not a “book review” as such, but a personal response from an artist and seeker who has been preoccupied with the borderlands of life and death for as long as I can recall. [Read more…]