Iskra Fine Art

Iskra December Shows, and New Forest Series Prints and Stationary

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I don’t know how you celebrate Halloween, but I spent the evening with small humans disguised as dinosaurs, observing the effect of sugar on developing metabolism. In an adult dinosaur, the consumption of three Almond Joys and a slice of pumpkin pie results in near-immediate narcolepsy. In a child of three it means competing for gold in Bouncing Off the Wall. . . for hours. I am now (almost) recovered from the excitement, and busy preparing work for the holiday shows.
 
In December I will be part of two events to lift the spirit. I hope you will join me at SAM Gallery for a first look at Gathering on Thursday, December 4, 5:30-6:30 pm, or for the artist’s reception on Saturday, December 20, 2-4 pm.

Iskra Johnson and Katie Metz in Gathering at SAM Gallery

I am looking forward to joining the artists at Building C for the December Open House as a guest of Meegan McKiernan. This thriving hub of artists is a mainstay of the Ballard art scene, and I love being part of the community during the holiday season.

Open House at Building C 

Saturday, December 13th, from 2-9pm  4818 14th Avenue NW, Seattle, WA 98107

“The big brown warehouse across from the Ballard Office Max” at Leary Ave NW & 14th Ave NW. More information and directions at the Building C website.
 
At the open studio I’ll be offering a variety of cards from my England, architectural and botanical lines, prints in sleeves or framed to suite a range of budgets, and the Water Tower Project prints and book. I have completed several new sets of forest cards (see below) that make lovely winter or solstice greetings. 

 

Forest Cards

Leaf Sequence [Read more…]

“My City’s Filthy”: Vanishing Seattle at Bumbershoot!

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Industrial Nocturne Ashgrove Cement No. 7
Industrial Nocturne (Ashgrove No.7) | Watercolor and photography, limited edition archival pigment print
 

Vanishing Seattle Comes to Bumbershoot!

I am excited to be in Bumbershoot for the first time in many years! Curated by Cynthia Brothers of Vanishing Seattle, “My City’s Filthy“ includes the work of 60 artists in a show that pays tribute to the vanishing grit, authenticity and history of our city. August 30-9.1 at A/NT gallery. I especially appreciate that we will have a real catalog of the show we can hold in our hands, available at the show during Bumbershoot and afterwards via Asterism @asterism_books. 
 
I’m drawn to industrial portraits because of the inherent tensions in the subjects. This portrait of AshGrove cement features plumes from one of the most toxic and energy intensive products known. You are looking at something literally filthy, yet at the same time, in its particular architectural forms, and powerful presence in the landscape, quite beautiful. At this point, though we may dream of living in agrarian huts in a post-industrial utopia, cement is indispensable, a backbone of our construction and building industries. You cannot yet make cement via AI. And although Seattle is known for the very recent glossiness of high tech, our much longer history is of logging, mining, labor organizing, avant garde art, garage bands (HELlo Kurt!) and a whole lotta other actual physical making.
Dream Ship, limited edition pigment print, create from my original photography
 
The image above, from the Floating World series, is based on a photograph I took while going down the Duwamish River in a kayak, eye level with the hull of the boat. The first time I floated the Duwamish I was barely 20, on a tugboat with a saxophone player named Charlie and his girlfriend, listening alternately to his jazz riffs and Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. My romance with the river, and all things maritime, resurfaced through my artwork in 2010. In the context of a show that does not shrink from nostalgia I think it is just fine to reflect on “the river of time. . .”
 
The opening reception for My City is Filthy was a wonderful cross-generational gathering. I found myself reminiscing with old friends and new about the vanished moments of places in our sometimes challenging love affair with this city. One thing that struck me about the diverse work is that much of it is made by people between 20-40, many of whom did not grow up here. In spite of the messaging that the hyper development in Seattle, (the proposed-use signs on every block for the density that is supposed to bring us affordable housing), is for those 20-40 yearolds, they are not actually that keen on it. They’d like the dive bar and $3 shots back, please, and you can take your 350 square foot “one bedroom” for $2,300 in a 7 story cube of identical apartments back to the suburb factory where it came from.
 

[Read more…]

Book Launch! The Water Tower Project from Iskra Fine Art

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The Water Tower Project Book

In the long distance between this post and the last I have been single-mindedly focused on creating my first book: The Water Tower Project. I have always moved back and forth between word and image, and as time has passed the words have grown from notes in the margins of sketchbooks and social media into essays in their own right. The urgency of recent political events has sparked an idea that has been waiting to take shape since 2020. 

As a long-time designer of letterforms, I always look first to words and symbols to wrestle meaning out of chaos. During pandemic’s first months I created a series of 20 pieces of photographic art called The Water Tower Project. The water tower emerged as a symbol that evolved into an image; the form became a container into which I could pour my sense of disequilibrium, and hope to stumble into transformation. The water tower, hand-hammered, crafted by artisans, and hoisted to the city skyline, is the German Shepherd of industrial infrastructure. Noble, resilient, stoic, a timeless architectural archetype poised on the rooftop between heaven and earth. Judge or Witness? It is also a character and a canvas on which to project collective story.  

Five years post-2020, as we are confronted with a new order of global and national disruption, this series has become more relevant than ever. I have returned to the subject with three new pieces included in the book. The pages alternate between image and story, reflecting on parallel streams of politics, history, personal evolution and collective struggle as we move through unprecedented times.

Pandemic Barriers
A book is a thing you can hold in your hands. No intelligence but your own is required, and much as you might try to plug it in with the latest usb, it #resists – and insists you use your hands to turn the pages.

[Read more…]

Spring Tulip Suite Stationary and New Rural Landscapes

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Pink Tulip Arabesque colored pencil drawing
Spring Tulip Arabesque, from an original drawing in colored pencil on Moleskine

It’s Tariff Week, and the stock ticker has gone missing from Fox News today, presumably to indicate what a special moment this is. It’s beginning to feel a lot like 2008. That was the spring I sat stunned at my kitchen table watching the securities auctions fail, the securities that TD Ameritrade had said “were as safe as a money market but better.” My kitchen table became my oasis for reinventing sanity and meaning through drawing. There was no internet, only a radio and a tape cassette. Silence, doom, music, repeat. The silence was at first excruciating, but as I drew, it became an enveloping calm and helped me through a time of instability and fear I had not known before. The blog post of that moment has come in handy several times since. Kitchen tables stand the test of time.

In honor of that memory I have returned to the work created then and refined the drawings as the Spring Tulip Suite in my stationary collection. It has been a quiet revelation to pick up a pencil and to go back into work done 17 years ago. As part of my TariffWeek sale, subscribers to my newsletter receive a 10% discount on items in my shop (excluding stationary.) If you would like to receive a discount code I would love to welcome you as a subscriber!

Tulip Suite Stationary
The Spring Tulip Suite, from originals in colored pencil on Moleskine, available as fine stationary cards in my shop.
Tulip Leaves Fine Art Stationary
Tulip leaves are pure sculpture…As a leaf emerges it turns on its axis towards the light, and each turn creates a ripple of subtle greens and earth shades, at times picking up the blue of the sky.

In other print news, Seattle Art Museum Gallery has added a selection of unframed work from gallery artists, which you can peruse in the front of the gallery by the painting racks. I am excited to have a rotating collection of my limited edition prints there!

Farm Structures sketchbook
Farm structures, acrylic on prepared ground
Sky waiting for cloud form

As in 2020, the eerie lack of rails on society and the economy has brought the opportunity of time to explore and develop new ideas without external pressures. It is a great comfort to go “back to the land” and the farm structures and pastoral patterns of rural life that surrounded me as a child. If, at the end of the next four years, I can paint a convincing barn I’ll be happy. Here are a few quick glimpses of work in the studio: surface, abstraction, atmosphere and architecture.Farm Building 7

Regardless of the weather ahead, the sun today is lovely. I hope you can find the time to take a walk, gather camelias, and admire the incorruptible beauty of spring.

Object Lessons: The Valentine

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As work in the studio moves in new directions not yet ready to surface, I offer you, in lieu of new paintings, my morning’s meditation on the season.

I hear this month half-melted in dirty snow belongs to a Saint dressed in velvet. Amid the scrolling bonfires of vitriol, romance still flutters “below the fold” as they used to say, back in the day when you could iron the news in half.

Forgive me if I had misplaced February. At Trader Joe’s, on a mission to find King County’s last carton of eggs, I pushed my cart past the bulbs dangling jaundiced roots and the sticks that hold up orchids and arrived at a startling array of succulents in pink ceramic hearts. I paused. Such an unexpected sweetness they offered, tiptoeing into the swirling turmoil of my thoughts. I looked at the scalloped edges of the planters and the cascades of pearls and hens and chicks and said to myself, I am not the kind of person who buys such a thing. [Read more…]