Iskra Fine Art

Mixed Media Adventures: A Process Journal from Iskra Fine Art

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Vintage Life Woman Iskra Collage
Vintage Life: The Ever-Present Past Perfect Tense

It has been a full season since I last wrote here. I dimly remember a dark winter, (are my socks still damp?) with sunlight rationed as though WW2 never ended. Right now, mid April and 70 degrees, we have an armistice: the bamboo is incandescent in sunlight above the pond and the towhee is singing his one song which is “towhee, towhee.” Annoying, but reassuring, as the song means “here I am, being myself, as usual, and by the way thankyou for not over-pruning the laurel hotel because we really like that leafy wallpaper. Is it British?”

What a relief! We got here! Eggs are being made and laid, the vaccine is working, and someone came for a toasted bagel in my kitchen today: we ate it unmasked, with butter! (I don’t know if it is possible to put too many exclamation points after the buttered toast….)

The little very small things make me very happy. 12 months of pandemic have wrought changes. I have found myself gravitating to the size of the page, an intimate space where art is not performance, but conversation: The missing intimacy of whispers and histories traded and notated in the margins; old books, primers, notions catalogs from St. Louis, 1923, the Seattle Telephone book 1947.

Vintage Phone Book Seattle
When every number started with a letter

In this year the present has seemed indefinitely suspended, and I’ve been going back in time. One restless afternoon I stumbled onto one of Seattle’s last antique stores, soon to be leveled for condos, and began documenting it with my camera. Somehow, in the act of filming a book’s pages as I turned them, words lifted from the page and became sound. On my last visit there I came home with “back issues” of newspapers from 1924 and 1915. Now in the morning I sit at the kitchen table and pour over the recital reviews and petulant letters from second chair violinists in Musical America. I find myself absurdly thrilled that Wadsworth Provandie’s debut in a production of The New Life got a “rousing ovation and he sang twice.” I learn the proper techniques of canoeing in a skirt, on The Girls’ Page in The Youth’s Companion. Reading these frayed bits of history gives me perspective. We may complain about social media censorship, but it took Machiavellian footwork to get the parts for Mahler’s 8th past the cablegram censors before WWI. Imagine an orchestra performance being held up for a year because “the parts were in Europe.” [Read more…]

Iskra in A Wing and A Prayer at Museo Gallery

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A Wing and a Prayer at Museo Gallery

I am excited to be part of A WING AND A PRAYER opening at Museo Gallery January 20th, with artists Elena Korakianitou, Michael Dickter, Faith Scott Jessup and Jean Whitesavage.

“A celebration of our ultimate optimism for our world, our embrace of transformation, and a recognition that we may need a little divine help along the way.  Opening on a significant day both politically and astrologically, January 20th,  Museo hopes that this show will encourage peace and hope.”

Museo is open 11-6 Thursday through Monday.
Tuesdays & Wednesdays by chance, or by appointment.

The show will continue through March 1st.

MUSEO GALLERY
215 First Street | P O Box 548
Langley, WA 98260
360.221.7737
museo@whidbey.com

I will be showing my recent series of limited edition images based on statues of angels, some available framed or mounted on panel, and others available unframed at the gallery or through the Gallery website. The language of statues is one of many ways I’ve explored the distance between sky and earth. This piece, a variation on the myth of Icarus, will be available at the gallery to see in person.

Icarus 3 by Iskra
Icarus 3, © Iskra Fine Art, variant edition print, several sizes, available to see now at Museo.

If you have the time to make a day of it I suggest a walk on Double Bluff. Eastern clouds may take their shape from the land, but island clouds listen only to the sky.

Cloud forms at Double Bluff Whidbey Island by Iskra
Cloud Forms, Double Bluff ©Iskra Fine Art

Farewell 2020: The Ledger

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The Ledger limited edition print by Iskra

The Ledger, ©Iskra Johnson

The year: no summary statements can do it justice. Instead, I offer an image, just one: “Ledger.” It began as an exploration of the Mourning Theorems of early American folk art. There was a willow tree. There was the idea of velvet, of fruit baskets arranged and lovingly drawn in another light, (perhaps the pale lyric light of spring,) and of women in “drawing rooms”: women young, old, perilously middle-aged, sometimes barren, but women regardless, perhaps surrounded by thirteen children, or perhaps feeding biscuits to one tottering and garrulous German shepherd in some log cabin shack on the great plains; women reaching for the sewing basket on New Years Eve as muskets went off on the horizon and the men stormed around drunk.

For years I had a ritual of sewing on New years Eve. I had an actual woven reed basket, knee-high, and in it was a stack of clothes going back, and back . . . to the first threadbare jeans and the first embroidered patch on a knee in denim in the 8th grade. (I think I stitched a rainbow when I was 13, remember those?) At the bottom of the basket was a clown my mother made of socks and Mid-Century Modern fabrics, split down the middle between black and white and color, a harlequin icon of her day, when a housewife had a choice of valium and the vacuum cleaner or dancing to Chubby Checkers in the afternoon and writing letters to the editor. I never could figure out the sock part. [Read more…]

Western Landscape Photography Portfolio

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Gate to the West Photography by Iskra
Gate to the West,©Iskra Fine Art

 

New Directions: Photographs of the Western Landscape

Are there affirmable days or places in our deteriorating world? Are there scenes in life, right now, for which we might conceivably be thankful? Is there a basis for joy or serenity, even if felt only occasionally? Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?

– Robert Adams

In October I found myself in the middle of an ocean of grass almost swallowed by basalt. I looked up at the black palisade of stone stacked against sky, a magpie’s wing shadowing the trail ahead, and asked out loud: “Is this a photograph? Should I follow this impulse? Landscape photography isn’t what I really do…..”

There was long pause as my walking companion vanished around a bend. The field caught the slant of afternoon sun like knife blades, each edge of grass etched against stone. The moment seemed to command me to see and record in a way I was not accustomed to – not with the collage artist’s eye for disassemblage, but as a witness to the exact 1/60th of a second in front of me. I raised my camera and started shooting, unsure of why, but thinking maybe I’d figure it out before the sun set.

Although I have been obsessed with cameras and photography for much of my life, I have never considered myself a traditional “photographer.” Rather, I have seen the camera as way to inquire and to be present in place. The images made have always been secondary to the experience that looking through a lens affords. The technology of f-stops and aperture and ASA, the confounding dials with microscopic lines between here and my destination, and the chance, in analog days, of a precious 36 exposures tripping on a sprocket, all seemed to require a full time German in residence, and I am much more Irish. I have always been immune to systems, and I suffer from profound dyslexia when it comes to math. Someone asked me recently if this new series of landscape photographs was made using the “zone system” and I had to check my voluminous and completely disorganized notes – oh yes, that.  My process is intuitive, and overlays multiple systems based on the aesthetics of printmaking and drawing.­

In making photographic prints I am looking for luminance and iconic form, and a sense in the body of being there. Are there ten shades of gray from white to black – who cares? Does it feel and look like memory and the way the air moved? Can I smell the smoke in the air, or the sage, or hear the sound basalt makes as it cools down between late afternoon and evening?

Canyon Creek Tree Photo by Iskra
Canyon Creek Tree,©Iskra Fine Art

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Thoughts on the Act of Editing: Photographic Reality, and How you Look at a Forest Fire

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Forest Tree Portrait photograph by Iskra
Interregnum, ©Iskra Fine Art (Available in two sizes, click image to see details.)

New Directions: Western Landscape Photography Part 1

 

Today I have been living with this tree, captured originally in full color (though muted and overcast) in a forest east of the mountains. I say, “this tree,” but you, the viewer, might not be seeing the same tree I am. You might be seeing the tree on the right, scorched by fire, and interlaced with the bleached needles of a pine that may or may not see spring. I am aware of that tree also. But in the moment of stepping into this meadow what stood out against the uneven and patchy hill was the shimmering tree with yellow leaves and white bark. In a soundscape emptied of birds the wind in its leaves made the only sound.

As I go back in time to this moment the digital darkroom allows me to ask “What is this story about?” countless times, and each time to come up with a different answer. A voice I’ve heard often says “People don’t like dark. Make it light, make it hopeful.” Leonard Cohen speaks up on another station and says, helpfully “Make it darker,” as for that poet the darker the shadows the brighter the illumination. In developing a photographic print I cycle through decision after decision, undoing, saving, revisiting, doubting, knowing, unknowing. Each revision of value rewrites light’s story, saying: the point is the mountain, or the pines, or the sky. Finally it may land on this, perhaps a tale of the heroine in white, surrounded by courtiers and knights and armies in the distance.

In the forests around Yakima the shape of the aspens tug at a memory of the archaic, and make me think of Joan of Arc in a book I saw as a child. The pages of the book were engraved and brown at the edges, pungent with age. Joan sat on her horse deep in a copse, her armor camouflaged by dappled light, her sword glinting. The style was detailed, each leaf individually drawn and burnished against a pewter sky. In the grove, momentarily safe, Joan was thinking, and gathering herself. On my hikes I kept looking for her, expecting her to ride forth, tossing her hair as she leaned under a branch, turned a corner on the trail, and paused to look out into the distance. What would Joan have said? Dark or light, or a middle tone? I am not sure, but her horse would have led up the canyon into the fire, which was still smoking. [Read more…]