Iskra, Author at Iskra Fine Art

My House Is Not A Tree: Art, Shamanism & The Demon Flicker

August 1, 2013 by Iskra 4 Comments

Awhile back I had a Flicker on the side of my house. By the wording of that sentence you may know that I mean attached as though with adhesive, firmly anchored, determined, and loud. A Flicker is a bird that thinks your house is either A) a piece of wood that he can bore into and coax ants into or B) a dead tree or soon to be dead tree that already has ants and other insects living in it rent free — insects which the Flicker plans to have for breakfast, between 4 and 5 AM.

On a fine spring morning you may find yourself barefoot in your bathrobe with a garden hose, screaming and spraying into the eaves as the protected and very handsome bird looks over his shoulder at you and says, “Huh.” If you are me, you start painting pictures to explain the situation — to the bird.

House Is No A Tree — My House is Not A Tree © Iskra Johnson

This went on for quite awhile. I tried a lot of different approaches to organizing the message. Some were direct, some were oblique.

I grew in a strange way quite fond of him. I assumed he was a him. When he attacked the gutters I nicknamed him Donald Rumsfeld, remember him?

Flicker: Getting To Know You, © Iskra Johnson

I tried reversing him, and I gave him a very fine tree with lots of bark. And finally I did this painting, the last in the series, which may have been the one that finally got the message across, because he went away and I have never been bothered since:

I recently was approached by someone who also had a bird attached to her house, and she took possession of this painting to see what powers it might have. I requested that my patron sign an indemnification agreement, as I cannot guarantee that this kind of magic will work twice. And it occurs to me tonight as I look around the studio and into the eaves that I may have broken a rule of art and magic, as now my bird is gone, and perhaps along with it the protective spell. Tomorrow morning, if you see a woman in her bathrobe spraying a garden hose into the sky and shouting in some strangled and incomprehensible language, that will be me.

New Portfolio of Construction Site Photography

July 9, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Landscape With Concrete Forms, © Iskra Johnson

I photographed my first construction site over 30 years ago. At least three men with bullhorns shouted at me as I walked a long gangplank into the center of an open pit the size of a city block. I could not resist the bright red ladders, the spiking rebar and randomly thrown coils of wire, the orange triangles and cones and wooden spools, the augurs and blades – all massed against a landscape of mud brown and gray. The scene spoke of the chaos phase of creativity, when shape and sense are only dimly glimpsed, and anything is possible. Not to mention that it was BIG. A few months later the newspaper carried a piece about a woman in an evening dress with a cast on her arm who was found, drunk and asleep on a beam in the unfinished 6th story. It occurred to me then that not for nothing do they measure skyscrapers in “stories.”

My fascination with monumental structure, excavation, history, surface and the ambiguous terrain between ruin and renewal has continued as our world has moved into a phase of urban development in hyperdrive. You can visit any city in the world and see the unmistakeable filigree of orange cranes rising above the skyline. The new landscape incorporates an ever-changing theater of half-walls, scaffolds, massive draperies and open pits girded by barriers as interesting as what is behind them.

The photographs here reflect the influence of the theory of wabi-sabi: nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect. And within this recognition lies a very particular kind of beauty. Purely documentary photographs form the basis for much of my work in the series Construction/Reconstruction although I often obscure or alter them beyond recognition in the process of collage. The images in this new portfolio stand alone as photographs, a record of a singular time and place. Archival pigment prints are available in a range of sizes.

See more at: Construction Site Photography

“Drive-By”: The Alaska Way Viaduct at the Golden Hour

July 2, 2013 by Iskra 1 Comment

One of Seattle’s soon to be lost treasures is the Alaskan Way Viaduct. I had my office next door to it for eight years and learned to love and hate its noise and dirt and it’s hulking and fundamental “in-the-way-ness.” However, when one is not eye level from an office window cursing the dust and noise but rather on it or driving right next to it, perhaps at the golden hour, there are few more intoxicating sights than the Port and the great cranes and Elliott Bay glimpsed between its pillars.

This view is now complicated with additional intrigue by the Big Dig. If you love structures and infrastructure and seeing the bones of things, this is the place to be. I have taken hundreds of cellphone pictures on the drives to West Seattle and back, and have begun a project using these images called, quite literally, “Drive-By.” I am using digital media combined with painting to create what feel to me very much like old fashioned monoprints. I made monoprints for years using oil based ink on zinc, and I love the technique. It is a wonderful challenge to use digital technology with the same sense of play and spontaneity, using masks and layer effects to “wipe” the plate, and to print plates (translated as Photoshop layers) over each other, with infinite ability to adjust density and color.

Photography and print making are ideal ways to capture the sense of time flashing, of the way reality exposes itself on the retina and how then memory overlays one image onto another, like tissue paper through which color and a sense of the sky bleed through. In this case of course it is not just memory but motion itself creating the layers.

Three glimpses:

Drive By At Dusk The Port arachival pigment print — “Drive-by at Dusk: Hanjin” archival pigment print © iskra Johnson

Drive By 2 The Port archival Print — “Drive-by 2,” archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson

Drive-By-In-Pink:Hanjin — “Drive-by in Pink,” archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson

Drive-By Day Two: Cellphone Transfer Prints

I have not made any transfer prints in awhile, and it occurred to me that it might be the next step for these images. Cell phone resolution can be frustratingly chunky when printed large, but the transfer process takes natural advantage of soft blurs and ambiguities, and these images lend themselves to a tactile surface and intimate scale. On these two I used Apollo transfer film on hot press watercolor with spray alcohol (92%). It’s counter-intuitive, but for some reason the temperature today in the studio, which nearly matched that of the alcohol, seemed to help the process along.

It feels wonderful to surrender to color. I fell in love with Maxfield Parrish’s clouds in a junk shop when I was in the sixth grade. Ash Grove Cement might as well be a neo-Greek column, and that shape in the middle could be a neo-nymph looking up in reverie at plumes of steam. Who says industry isn’t romantic? And who can resist a name like “Ash Grove?”

Ash Grove Cement (For Maxfield Parish) transfer print — “Ash Grove Cement, for Maxfield,” transfer print on watercolor paper 7″ x 7″ © Iskra Johnson

"To Avalon," transfer print on watercolor paper, 7" x 7", © Iskra Johnson — “To Avalon,” transfer print on watercolor paper, 7″ x 7″, © Iskra Johnson

(Not yet printed, but I thought I would include it here to show the surface difference between the native image and prints with similar imagery.)

See more artwork on industrial themes at the print portfolios for Construction/Reconstruction and Infrastructure.

Impermanence Study No.17: The Dragonfly

June 20, 2013 by Iskra 2 Comments

Impermanence Study No.17 (Dragonfly), © Iskra Johnson, Archival Pigment print, 16″ x 16″

This time of year the pond is dizzy with dragonflies. They hover in a cloud of iridescent blue, migrating from the waterlilies to the yellow poppies, and I have even seen them in the house, poised over the threshold of the front door. When I found the body of a checkered dragonfly on a lily pad last July I started this piece, which is now in its 17th iteration. Maybe you call that a …..”series.” Collage is the art of decision– and indecision. It is the ultimate practice of impermanence, as any element can be moved at any time to create a new shift in perception. If, in your own dragon-fly hovering, you begin to doubt and become anxious for resolution, you lose sight of the wonder that illuminates the process. I am influenced lately by a provocative book by Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. I read this when it first came out in 1994, but had not consciously thought about it for years. The new edition includes black and white photographs that elucidate each premise with quiet and subversive elegance. This passage uses the garden as metaphor, but could as easily refer to making art or any other creative endeavor: All things are incomplete. All things, including the universe itself, are in a constant, never-ending state of becoming or dissolving. Often we arbitrarily designate moments, points along the way, as “finished” or “complete.” But when does something’s destiny finally come to fruition? Is the plant complete when it flowers? When it goes to seed? When the seeds sprout? When everything turns into compost? The notion of completion has no basis in wabi-sabi. Of course, Edna St. Vincent Millay also said, “To create one must decide.” And the challenge is to hold both truths and not go crazy. I find it helps to work until midnight, when things get very quiet, to a certain kind of music. The artist of the snuff bottle, on the other hand, had not the luxury of indecision. Bottles like this one were painted with tiny brushes from the inside of the bottle. Ponder that feat of execution next time you think you have a technical challenge.

Through A Glass Darkly Dragonfly Snuffbottle print — Through a Glass Darkly (Impermanence Study No. 12), ©Iskra Johnson, archival pigment print, 16″ x 16″

Soundtrack: Darshan Ambient, anything by Michael Allison. Or Catching Up to You. Or Sidney Ji’s meditative Water Sines.

Finding the Fourth Leaf

May 31, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Four Leaf Clover Painting, Acrylic on Canvas, 4″ x 4″, © Iskra Johnson

One of the advantages of growing up on a farm is that you spend a lot of time being just a few feet tall and eye-level with the field. Later, but slowly, you grow a bit and look down, and all the tops of things come into view. Your sense of wonder at that age is matter-of-fact and practical, scaled for harvest. Everything fits in your fist or your back pocket or between your teeth. If you develop the habit of looking down, soon you find four-leaf clovers everywhere.

For years if I opened books from my shelf at random, in particular, books like Black Beauty, or The Wind in the Willows, clovers would scatter onto the floor. The knack of finding them stayed with me for years, and then one day I forgot about it. I gave books away, whole shelves full, without remembering to open them first. My luck, I would have to say, was not exceptional, and there were times I would look around me and feel that some intangible thing was missing. Who knows how the fourth leaf, of grace, comes into one’s life? Last week I visited Fernwoodsy, a magical place of dappled light and bees and meadow. And for just a moment I looked down…..