Iskra, Author at Iskra Fine Art

Paths to Intuition in Digital Printmaking

June 13, 2017 by Iskra 1 Comment

intuitive composition Iskra Fine Art — Morning pages digital composition practice

The big puzzle in my studio life right now is how to maintain access to intuition while working in the highly technological medium of digital print making. As someone coming from traditional printmaking, and particularly monoprint, I prize the excitement of accidents and transformations not entirely in my control. And the things I look at obsessively, like the sides of dumpsters and the backs of stop signs, are surfaces of completely unintentional beauty. To get this feeling of things — to get the reality, more importantly — it’s essential to embed in the workflow some wild cards. The images I have been doing recently are taking radical new turns, and it’s because I have been taking risks and learning how to embrace chaos.

What is Digital Printmaking?

First, for those reading who may think of digital printmaking as simply scanning a painting and printing it from a computer, or using a mouse or stylus to draw, a brief explanation. [Read more…]

About This Blog

May 7, 2017 by Iskra 2 Comments

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. [Read more…]

New Work in Black and White

April 27, 2017 by Iskra 1 Comment

“It is very easy, red is red and blue is blue.” – The Color Kittens

“A red apple is a good example of subtractive color; the apple really has no color; it has no light energy of its own, it merely reflects the wavelengths of white light that cause us to see red and absorbs most of the other wavelengths which evokes the sensation of red. The viewer (or detector) can be the human eye, film in a camera or a light-sensing instrument.”—RGB World

Periodically I find it useful to step back from color and limit choice. Someone almost as famous as the Color Kittens once said, “Color is hard.” Color can be a lot of information, extra data not always necessary for telling a particular kind of story. Subtracting color can, as they put it on those reading comp tests from the third grade, help you choose “which sentence describes what this story is about.”

The story right now is about memory. [Read more…]

Industrial Silence | (And Save the Date!) #MakeAmericaCreateAgain at CoCA

March 20, 2017 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Industrial Light Photograph by Iskra Johnson — Industrial Silence, © Iskra Johnson

Industrial silence is a three part harmony of dripping rust, heavy metal and the slanting light of late afternoon. If you listen carefully you can hear walls corrugating and wire mapping a path through the milky green of ancient skylights. In the distance, there is the hum of large trucks idling, and close up the interrogating roar of generators programmed to shock a tourist out of reverie. There is always the cantor and the choir of crows and gulls, one shrieking, one mewling, and sometimes thin coils of rubber poised like snakes. Most of the written words are warnings. Wear your steel toe boots, don’t touch, don’t trespass, turn this crank to the left and then up, do not drink what is in this barrel, although I always hope somewhere in the sans serif commands I will find an anthemic “raise high the roofbeam carpenters!”

Every silence is different, but each one reminds me of the other, so as I walk through train yards and factories on Sundays when everyone is gone I also think of Berlin, [Read more…]

The Art of Infrastructure

February 11, 2017 by Iskra 2 Comments

“For poets of the ordinary nothing has to be something else to be more than what it is.”— Anon

For People who Like Orange, industrial art print by Iskra — *For People Who Like Orange, Mixed media archival pigment print on paper or canvas, size variable up to 50″*

Contain. Hold. Spill. Accept. Refuse. ref-yoos. Dumpsters put a lid on what we can’t bear to keep or smell or look at any longer, and give us the illusion that our national sin of consumer indulgence is not squandered, but instead made noble through the absolution of waste management. All that discarded packaging is repackaged and sits neatly on the street in a box. Occasionally the lid lifts at a provocative angle and stays there, held by chains and wheels in suspension and possibility. Crows come. Lunch is foraged, toasters reclaimed, and on certain days of the week someone finds a discarded mattress and takes a nap. Dumpsters have their own oratory. Although more punk rock than symphony, every city gets a daily concert of metal on metal and smashing glass, the rumble of trucks, and the quieter transcripts of disenfranchisement and identity that take place at night, each one overwriting the other with a soft hiss and the percussive shake of the little ball in its can of paint. [Read more…]