Iskra Fine Art

Industrial Strength at SAM Gallery, with Iskra Johnson, Kate Protage, and Kellie Talbot

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Ash Grove in Blue, by Iskra Johnson, SAM Gallery
Ash Grove in Blue, 40 x 42 in., archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson

Please save the date for the opening reception of Industrial Strength on second Thursday at SAM Gallery, September 14 from 6-7:30 PM. This show presents the work of painters Kellie Talbot, Kate Protage and myself, exploring our three very different interpretations of the industrial landscape.

Late last year when SAM Gallery suggested I propose a show the idea for “Industrial Strength” quickly surfaced. I have long been fascinated by the dramatic and heroic scale of industrial infrastructure, whether it involves trainyards, cement plants and construction sites, or the stubborn and implacable charm of the slightly less heroic dumpster. The urban landscape is papered with the beauty of accidental surface, composed of error overlayered with more error, moments of intention and endless revision. This pentimento is, in any language, a story. I love the challenge of marrying surface and atmosphere with structure, and here in the northwest we have it all: more cranes than any other city in the USA  and more Northwest Mystic Cloud Cover™, not to mention two epic mountain ranges, the Duwamish River, a lake, a bay and the vast expanse of Puget Sound. Against this backdrop the machinery of industry has never looked so good. [Read more…]

Summer Print Sale!

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The Crimson Monarch print by Iskra“The Crimson Monarch,” 15.5 x 15.5 ” 1/20, available during the Summer Print Sale

I have been super busy this summer finishing the body of work for Industrial Strength, a three-woman show opening at SAM Gallery on Wednesday September 13th. Something about wrapping up a set of work and being “done” just seems to lead to more ideas. I keep coming back to The Floating World as a source of inspiration, and each time I find something new. Sometimes all I see is the sky and the water, and sometimes I see the shore, the anchor and the fine tethers that keep one from floating away. The great ship the Crimson Monarch was moored beneath the Elliott Bay grain elevators a few months ago. By May it had rained for eight months and on the first sunny Sunday of the year I could not wait to get out to the waterfront with my camera. I fell madly in love with this ship and the way it faced the sun, owning the bay. I use real names in my ship portraits. If you want to kick back with a beverage that puts you in a nautical frame of mind and a pair of binoculars, you can follow the Crimson Monarch on shipspotting.com. [Read more…]

LaConner & Whidbey Island Summer Art Finds (Roadtrip!)

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artis roadtrip in the Skagit by Iskra
Pacific Northwest Pastorale, with Lombardy poplar (that would be a French tree….)

Let’s say you kick back for the 4th and check your social media and once again all your friends are posting vineyard photos of the South of France and the rest of them are gloating about having immigrated to Canada. You could be consumed with a terrible envy, or you could do what we did and make a tiny trip up the road and around the Sound and come back sated with beauty right here in the Pacific Northwest. Instead of waiting three hours in a ferry line we started the weekend art tour by skipping up the road to LaConner by way of Conway. The plain, thrilling ungentrified beauty of the Skagit reminded me there is life outside of Crane City and brooding about the hyperventilated cost of a 175 square foot room with a bed. Did I mention those trees in the photo above are French?

Also, there are cats. [Read more…]

Paths to Intuition in Digital Printmaking

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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

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The writing desk, a journal life

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…]