Iskra, Author at Iskra Fine Art

Choro Loco! New works about listening to music…..

January 31, 2011 by Iskra Leave a Comment

The other night I went to a concert of Choro music at The Chapel, a hidden gem of a concert venue. My friend Jere Smith, an artist in good standing at the good Shepherd Center, introduced me to this exquisitely calibrated performance space. Phenomenal acoustics and an architecture of reverential mystery: you don’t forget your listening moments here. I was completely swayed by Choro Loco and it’s dedicated cast of musicians on clarinet, accordion, guitar and triangle. I have never seen a clarinetist undulate like smoke– who knew this was a sexy instrument???

I got into that music space, where notes take color-shape and the 1930’s blend with 1910 and future-perfect and perfect-past in five languages. Remembrances of tango, waltz, polka, and sophisticated new-music grooves all interwoven into a heady eutophia — that’s utopia mixed with euphoria in case you haven’t yet been. Soon I pulled out my cell-phone, and started photographing in the low-res light. Herewith the first three prints in a new series called Choro: Listening to Music. All source material: Droid photos. Alcohol gel prints on Arches 88.

First Image of the New Year: The Golden Bird + Thoughts on Mixed Media

January 2, 2011 by Iskra 1 Comment

On New Years morning a Varied Thrush made a rare appearance in the bare maple above the pond. I photographed him through the window and a few hours later made a transfer print from the photograph onto layers of metallic silver, gold and luminescent white. I made four prints, each time trying new ways of burnishing the transparency. I found that by spraying water on the actual transparency material I could get a feeling of old world mezzotint–with no control. Then I started brushing the painted paper with water instead, using varying pressure to gradually adhere the ink with more fidelity to the plate.

I have a new Epson 3880 and it behaves very differently from the 2400. Previously I used alcohol to make transfers, but it left a thin skin on the paper resistant to subsequent overlays. The ability to transfer with water alone is exciting–no toxic fumes, and the surface is lovely, much more like silkscreen. I am finding that the transfer film has to sit for at least ten minutes after it comes out of the printer–it seems that the ink then “cures” and lifts more readily to water or to an acrylic medium, like opaque matte gel.

In photographic mixed media work I am looking for an immediacy of narrative in which I can look onto my world, capture it, and engage in a process that reveals more about the experience than I “know” in the moment. It is intimate and magical because through the process of pulling the print I can slow time down and go back to the initial glimpse of the experience of the “real,” of what I thought I saw– before it has been given language. For this afternoon I felt as not that I was looking through glass at a bird, but that I perched in the tree, privileged to visit the first bright day of the new year with the bird’s own eyes.

The-Golden-Bird — The Golden Bird, Transfer print on metallic paint, © Iskra Johnson

Head detail, from another version

The Manganese Day

December 29, 2010 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Winter_Trees — Winter Trees, brayer print, © Iskra Johnson

(The piece above is in indigo, not manganese but close on the colorwheel)

It’s been a long slog here in Seattle, buried in Paynes’ grey, and so today when manganese appeared in the western sky with tints of Maxfield Parrish cloud-happy-white one could not help but feel elated and at peace simultaneously. I went over to visit a painter friend who just incidentally has a studio overlooking the sky, a copse of urban trees, a hill, various houses, and what she described as “my version of Vermont.” We stared in raptness. Blue through bare branches: mitered, metered, salvaged, savored.

She only uses the real manganese, still made by Old Holland. We must have devoted at least half an hour to discussing pigment variability, granulation, viscosity, and the reinvention of Winsor & Newton, which she demonstrated to my complete amazement has NO color shift. (This means you can paint a nose in perfect flesh color on Tuesday and come back six months later and get back to the lower lip with no fear of dry paint not matching wet.) In between discussing paint we talked about The Idea of Vermont. This is a place where they never say “let’s do lunch.” They simply drag you out of your cabin through six foot snow-drifts for cabbage and a roast. Lord, I like those people. They have woodpiles and flannels, and wool-ruddy cheeks made that way through sheer scratchiness, which they never complain about. I myself am a complainer, which is why I live on the west coast, but dream about the other.

I stared out of the studio window, mesmerized. It really was Vermont. A sense of place so palpable you just wanted to pull out your rocking chair and never leave. And yet also here, and so: placeless. I have been stationed for quite a while at ground level, and it made me long for flights of stairs and lands unseen, for distance. Here, a view from close-up. Brayer print and charcoal on paper.

House and Tree,mixed media,Iskra — House and Tree, printing ink and charcoal, 8″ x 11″

The Promise of Light: Solstice 2010

December 22, 2010 by Iskra Leave a Comment

What an extraordinary Winter Solstice: a total lunar eclipse! It all happened behind a cloud over my house and I take it on faith. For me the moon is this golden poppy, speaking of the dreamscapes of warmth and light that keep us constant in winter.

Linda Davidson’s “Ormolu” at Catherine Person

December 5, 2010 by Iskra 2 Comments

My experience of gilding is limited to the placid world of calligraphy. Gold leaf fragile as butterfly wings rests on a red pillow. One lifts it to vellum and burnishes it onto a raised glue to form letters and ornaments. There is drama in the lift and the burnish and the potential failure to adhere, but one’s life is not in danger. In contrast, the centuries-old term “Ormolu” refers to the process of applying gold to bronze using fire and mercury. Gilders rarely lived beyond forty.

I can hope that Linda Davidson is with us for twice those years and more. Her current installation at Catherine Person Gallery is breathtaking. It’s the kind of experience that rearranges your braincells and your perception of the world. Nearly five hundred tiny individual paintings reach from floor to ceiling in a symphonic arrangement of blues, grays, true golds and mysterious ochers. There are quotes of the Baroque and fragments of airplane wings, abstract deconstructions juxtaposed with radiant clouds and brewing storms. The pieces soar in a choral progression towards a sky filled with ghosted putti, fragments of halo and exquisite compositions of the solitary image, a feather, a dog, a falling hand. At the bottom and the top bas relief constructions frame the edges, suggesting both the junkyard and the antique treasures of a forgotten museum.

As Person said after I had been there for the first half hour, (to be followed by another), this is the only exhibit she’s had where people have spent time on their knees and on ladders. Each time you look a new astonishment reveals itself. The range of surfaces includes plaster, mirror, metal, stamped resin, and many I could not determine, and a virtuoso vocabulary of painting methods from muralistic realism to abstract gesture. Some of my favorites were pure pencil on what appeared to be plaster, stunning compositions of line asserted, interrupted and obscured in delicate overlapping layers.

The overall installation works through the genius of juxtaposition and sequences knit into an anthemic whole. But each individual painting is for sale, and in the back of the gallery nails have been thoughtfully provided for the patrons of this work to arrange their selections in various orders. The prices are more than reasonable. The paintings are small, but they redefine scale. Somehow Davidson has mastered the art of composition so that each one is both a successful miniature and monumental, holding your gaze from across the room.

I plan to go back, and I can’t urge you strongly enough to go, absorb this work, and consider taking some part of it to live with you. I felt altered as I drove home along Elliott at sunset. I hope I will be forgiven for posting this small homage, a Linda Davidson sky, my version, taken with my cellphone at dusk.

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