Iskra Fine Art

“Breaking News: NSA Hacks Reynolds Wrap, Tinfoil Hat Will No Longer Will Protect You”

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Pandora
Pandora, charcoal dust and digital modification © Iskra Johnson

                  “Maybe stories are just data with a soul.” –Brené Brown

This Friday I went out to my neighborhood bar to celebrate the first week of the new year. I took my journal and my favorite pen and my phone, and sat next to another person dining solo. She had her phone propped up on her martini glass and never raised her eyes from it, even as she consumed her dinner and dessert and a second martini. I thought about how if she had a book at hand it would be the most natural thing in the world to ask her what she was reading, or to say, I’ve read that, it was great, even if I had no idea what the book was. And yet for a long time, though our elbows were four inches apart, I felt compelled to observe the mores of Seattle social etiquette: the closer you are to a stranger, the less you say.

Finally I could not resist my curiosity, and I asked if she was reading the news. This compelled her to raise her eyes and to list off her news feed, which included all the mainstream media plus “Mumbai, for some reason. My favorite is the BBC, I trust them.” I asked her if she ever read the indie news sources like Truthout or Common Dreams and she pursed her lips and shook her head.”I would never read something like that.” Conversation over. A few minutes later she raised her head again and reported, “Arkansas Lieutenant Governor accused of misconduct,” and went back to chewing her fries with aioli.

As the daughter of a newspaper publisher and a political activist, I will be the first to acknowledge an abject obsession with news, the worse the better. Trying to reconcile the big world and the little world, to parse the truth and find some meaning in making art in the middle of the apocalyptic mediafeed is a constant daily activity around here, which if you follow this blog you have read about before (sorry!). As part of my New Years resolutions I had vowed to be more mindful of what it does to my brain to allow the news in unfiltered, and to have perhaps a little more choice (hah!). On Friday as I browsed my phone in chastened silence and waited for dinner I came across a link on Facebook to Brené Brown’s brilliant Ted Talk about Vulnerability. Which of course made me think immediately about the NSA and the comment from our President after the first set of leaks to the effect that “perhaps some way would be found to work on encryption to make data safe.” Which was followed shortly by a new set of leaks about how yes, in fact the NSA was developing backdoor ways to un-encrypt private data to make it safe for the NSA to read our private mail at its leisure.

In other words, we are now all vulnerable all the time. According to Brené “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change,” but I am not quite sure this is what she had in mind.

A few hops and skips led me to a truly outlier independent news source that mentioned casually that soon drones the size of fleas will be able to see into our homes and hear what we are saying. Sigh, there goes pillow talk. Pick the strangest science fiction you find, and soon we will be living in it. Really, I just want to go back to “normal.” I so wish we could shut the box of hysteria unleashed after 9.11 and confine eavesdropping to the secret lives of plants.

There is always a flower in Pandora’s box, and the key to smelling its scent is, yes, vulnerability. It is raining here in Seattle, and spring is soon to come. There are good things. And if anybody is listening in, that’s all you’re going to hear today. “There are good things, there are good things……..”

Flower Drawing
Origins of Spring, powdered pigment and graphite on paper © Iskra Johnson

 

Year End Reflections, “Keeping Safe the Love Affair”

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Drive-By Viaduct In The Evening
Glimpse 3, The Viaduct in Evening © Iskra Johnson

I started this New Years’ Eve morning with an early visit to the Painters Keys, where Sara had posted an exceptionally lovely letter for the new year. If you don’t know about this site, do visit; it is an endless source of inspiration for painters and and artists in all media. Sara’s reminder via Corot to “never lose the first impression” stayed with me all morning as I returned to a series about the Alaska Way Viaduct after a long time away. The creative process (or at least my process) is one of continually losing the glimpse, and then looking for the way back. Sometimes getting lost is a necessary, if bracing, part of the journey.

_________________________________

It has been a wonderful year in art. I have been fortunate to be included in some terrific exhibits at Prographica, Bainbridge Arts & Crafts, Seattle Architecture Foundation and SAM Gallery (ongoing.) Studio visits with collectors and a recent purchase of one of the Duwamish prints by King county for their Portable Works Collection have rounded out the year. Ahead are two shows this spring, which I will be posting about soon. I feel very grateful for my artist groups that provide encouragement and critique, including my salon, Painters Under Pressure which is ending its first decade (!), and the unnamed but equally wonderful group of self-employed designers and artists I have met with each month for over a dozen years. We are a rare tribe, and I couldn’t persevere without them.

I’ll close with part of the letter from The Painters’ Keys, as I am completely smitten with it and I can’t put it any better:

When Claude Monet noticed the village of Giverny from a train window, he  made a decision to live out his days there. He later said that everything he ever earned went into his Giverny garden. “I love you because you are you,” he wrote to his work. Artists and their subjects are the star-crossed lovers of the world. They recognize each other on impact. Making the discovery on human steam, fueled by the spirit to get up and down the ladders, makes the most eventful love affair. “What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s response is always right,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As our year closes, we consider resolutions, or mark our moments of recognition……. As a community, we might just keep safe each other’s love affair.”

Three Days in Silence: This is Not a Haiku

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The Road To Cloud Mountain Photocollage
The Road to Cloud Mountain

   “The essence of spiritual practice is remembrance, whether it is remembering to come back  to  the present moment or recalling the truths of impermanence.”
— Andrew Holecek, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2013

   “Don’t talk, I can’t hear myself see.” –Jerry Saltz

I first visited Cloud Mountain 23 years ago for a seven day silent retreat. At that time a year of insomnia and grief in the wake of my father’s death had taken me to the brink of despair. My view of the world had become dangerously distorted, and if I wanted to come back to my life I needed to take my meditation practice to a different level and rewire my brain. This was before the idea of negativity bias had become commonly accepted in science and spiritual practice, and so in the first days of retreat I spent a lot of time beating myself up for my mind’s inexorable turning towards darkness. By the end of the seven days I had turned enough times to face the other direction that I could now see it existed. The searing images that appear in states of absorption may be only seconds in duration, yet they can powerfully and permanently alter the brain. As well, the steady accrual of mindfulness practice.

I will never forget the feeling of my hands on the steering wheel as I prepared to drive away at the end of the retreat. Did I still know how to drive? I tested the the brake pedal and fiddled with the key. I would start slowly. As I rolled down the hill at three miles per hour I realized that my father was still dead, that a particular sadness was permanent and immutable, and that I was okay. My breathing remained comfortable and calm, and my eyelids didn’t prickle. In that week nothing had changed in the facts of life, but my capacity to carry it had changed. I proceeded to drive directly onto a one-way road into a clear-cut. This is how it is: the world doesn’t stop being itself while I’m being quiet.

Over the several decades since, I have become steadily more happy. Terrible things happen, but without the added burden of taking them personally. When I feel grief I feel myself gathered in a very big net with others. I also increasingly live by this truth:  “Know that joy is rarer, more difficult and beautiful than sadness.” When I saw this quotation from Andre Gide in the description of Cloud Mountain’s December “Discovering Joy” retreat with Lila Kate Wheeler I signed on. Happiness and joy take vigilance, and continual practice. What follows are my notes from memory and a few photographs, taken after the formal retreat had ended.

Devotional Altar
Devotional Altar, Cloud Mountain

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The Light of December

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The Light of December Devotional Altar

This is the time of year I begin to realize that my meditation practice has devolved into drinking coffee slowly, rather than quickly, and looking out the window at robins. This is fine — the robins love an audience — but it isn’t quite the same as a practice. In November you can’t drag me out of bed before dawn. Yet by the first week of December something changes. My eyes fly wide at six AM. I want to sit in the early hour and listen closely to this very particular and resonant silence that leads to the darkest day, the longest night, and the beginning of the light. I want to be awake for each moment of passage to the winter solstice, and the ceremony of a sitting practice once again takes hold.

This year I signed on to a three day retreat with Kate Lila Wheeler.  I have been a follower of Wheeler’s writing since 1997, when I read her first collection of stories, Not Where I Started From. She is the rare meditation teacher who also has a serious art practice, in this case as novelist and essayist, and I have been looking for a chance to sit with her for years. This retreat is well positioned after the official holiday of Thanksgiving. The focus will be on mudita, the appreciation of the good fortune and well being of others. I would usually much rather focus on “worry”, (from the German, wurgen: “to strangle,” with no Pali translation) which is my acknowledged default setting, so this will be a welcome shift of gears. I suffer in cold weather (they predict snow?), so the weekend could be less an experience of transcendence and more of an extended Lands End Catalog fantasy in which I visualize the entire world swaddled in down bathrobes, with extra specially thick snowpants for me. To get ready for the retreat I have been re-reading some of my favorite books on Buddhism and meditation.

From Philip Moffitt, a variation of loving kindness meditation that always speaks to me:

     May you be safe from internal and external harm.

     May you have a calm, clear mind and a peaceful loving heart.

     May you be physically strong, healthy, and vital.

    May you experience love, joy, wonder, and wisdom in this life, just as it is.

 

Rachel Maxi’s ‘Little Made Big’ at Sugarpill: Painted Wonders and Apothecary Dreams

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I could say that the reason I like Rachel Maxi’s work is that she paints objects that I love too. But the truth is that whatever Maxi paints becomes one of my favorite things, even if I wasn’t planning on it. Plastic toy horses? Or for that matter, horses of any kind? Ever since The Red Pony broke my heart at age 11 I have been immune. Yet here I am, smitten.

Breyer Paint Horse ©Rachel Maxi
Breyer Paint Horse, 16″ x 18″, Oil on Panel, 2013 ©Rachel Maxi

Or, to take another hard sell, the dahlia? The word has always offended me: like “dhaling.” Overblown, old-lady-ish, the kind of flower you can only love when you are part of the Dahlia Society and enjoy tying plants up on sticks and telling people not to pick them. Except now not only am I in love with a dhalia, I want it in that very ordinary jar, because it’s just plain beautiful.  The word is covet:

Dhalia_Rachel Maxi
Dhalia, 46″ x 52″, Oil on Canvas, 2013 © Rachel Maxi

Check out Maxi’s work at Sugarpill on Capitol Hill, and do it fast, because this show is only up until November 19th. While you are there revel in the sensory magic of this one-of-a-kind shop: apothecary, culinary, mercantile…….mystery. Cures for whatever ails you and pleasures to keep you well.

(900 E. Pine St. Seattle, WA 98122 • T 206.322.7455 • MON + TUES 11AM – 5PM / WED + THU 11AM-7PM / FRI + SAT 11AM-6PM / SUN 11AM-4PM)