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Impermanence Study No.17: The Dragonfly

June 20, 2013 by Iskra 2 Comments

Impermanence Study No.17 (Dragonfly), © Iskra Johnson, Archival Pigment print, 16″ x 16″

This time of year the pond is dizzy with dragonflies. They hover in a cloud of iridescent blue, migrating from the waterlilies to the yellow poppies, and I have even seen them in the house, poised over the threshold of the front door. When I found the body of a checkered dragonfly on a lily pad last July I started this piece, which is now in its 17th iteration. Maybe you call that a …..”series.” Collage is the art of decision– and indecision. It is the ultimate practice of impermanence, as any element can be moved at any time to create a new shift in perception. If, in your own dragon-fly hovering, you begin to doubt and become anxious for resolution, you lose sight of the wonder that illuminates the process. I am influenced lately by a provocative book by Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. I read this when it first came out in 1994, but had not consciously thought about it for years. The new edition includes black and white photographs that elucidate each premise with quiet and subversive elegance. This passage uses the garden as metaphor, but could as easily refer to making art or any other creative endeavor: All things are incomplete. All things, including the universe itself, are in a constant, never-ending state of becoming or dissolving. Often we arbitrarily designate moments, points along the way, as “finished” or “complete.” But when does something’s destiny finally come to fruition? Is the plant complete when it flowers? When it goes to seed? When the seeds sprout? When everything turns into compost? The notion of completion has no basis in wabi-sabi. Of course, Edna St. Vincent Millay also said, “To create one must decide.” And the challenge is to hold both truths and not go crazy. I find it helps to work until midnight, when things get very quiet, to a certain kind of music. The artist of the snuff bottle, on the other hand, had not the luxury of indecision. Bottles like this one were painted with tiny brushes from the inside of the bottle. Ponder that feat of execution next time you think you have a technical challenge.

Through A Glass Darkly Dragonfly Snuffbottle print — Through a Glass Darkly (Impermanence Study No. 12), ©Iskra Johnson, archival pigment print, 16″ x 16″

Soundtrack: Darshan Ambient, anything by Michael Allison. Or Catching Up to You. Or Sidney Ji’s meditative Water Sines.

Finding the Fourth Leaf

May 31, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Four Leaf Clover Painting, Acrylic on Canvas, 4″ x 4″, © Iskra Johnson

One of the advantages of growing up on a farm is that you spend a lot of time being just a few feet tall and eye-level with the field. Later, but slowly, you grow a bit and look down, and all the tops of things come into view. Your sense of wonder at that age is matter-of-fact and practical, scaled for harvest. Everything fits in your fist or your back pocket or between your teeth. If you develop the habit of looking down, soon you find four-leaf clovers everywhere.

For years if I opened books from my shelf at random, in particular, books like Black Beauty, or The Wind in the Willows, clovers would scatter onto the floor. The knack of finding them stayed with me for years, and then one day I forgot about it. I gave books away, whole shelves full, without remembering to open them first. My luck, I would have to say, was not exceptional, and there were times I would look around me and feel that some intangible thing was missing. Who knows how the fourth leaf, of grace, comes into one’s life? Last week I visited Fernwoodsy, a magical place of dappled light and bees and meadow. And for just a moment I looked down…..

Ten Perfect Days in New York, with a Few Showers

May 15, 2013 by Iskra 4 Comments

Crossing The Brooklyn Bridge, with 10,000 other people. © Iskra Johnson

I have recently returned from ten incandescent days in New York City. Or rather, eight incandescent days and two with thunder and lightning and flash flood alarms. It’s that kind of world. Although I have been to New York many times it had been fifteen years since my last real visit of any length, and I had never committed that primal rite of passage, The Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge. Over the years it had evolved in my mind into an epic solo journey with only myself, the wind, and ancestral vertigo as company.

Ahh, those 10,000 other people, what did I know? And all of them walking home from Manhattan against my little tide. I can’t say enough about the beauty of tarps, and tarps with boldly censored grafitti which, for a person who makes their livelihood decoding the alphabet, is very close to bliss. I traveled well-protected in this billowing crib, although several Brooklyn-bound bicycles nearly took out my camera arm.

Walking Man With Brooklyn Bridge Bicycle Locks — Brooklyn Bridge Pedestrian With Lost Bicycle Locks, © Iskra Johnson

I would like to thank my dear friend and talented photographer Teresa Morani for showing me the Wonders of DUMBO and in general guiding me through the circuit overload of this astonishing city. (“Why,” asked a new acquaintance on the tarmac at La Guardia, “do they keep re-naming parts of the city that we already know some other way? What the hell is Dumbo?” I feel her pain, but I can’t really resist an acronym that stands for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.” It pretty much lets you know that you are entering a city where people live steeped in place. They notice things. (And of course, once noticed, things become very expensive……) Here are a few of the 1,734 moments glimpsed as I mostly walked Manhattan and Brooklyn, avoiding Google maps and asking someone new every few blocks where I was and where I was going. Many of these images will be available as prints at a later date and will be posted in the prints or photography section of my website. (Click each image to see larger.)

Central Park Spring Sky, © Iskra Johnson

The Player — Music at the Edge of the Park, © Iskra Johnson

Goddess Of Culture At The Met — So Much Culture, So Little Time (at the Met) © Iskra Johnson

Manhattan Fire Escapes Morning — Manhattan Fire Escapes: Morning, © Iskra Johnson

Liberty from the Shore — The Statue, © Iskra Johnson

A Room OnThe Street — A Room On The Street, © Iskra Johnson

Crossing with Signal — Signal, © Iskra Johnson

Improvements — Veil with Tree, © Iskra Johnson

Chess-In-Washington-Square — Chess In Washington Square, © Iskra Johnson

Empire-At-Night-(From-the-Highline) — Empire at Night (From the Highline), © Iskra Johnson

AboveThe Clouds — Above The Clouds (Coming Home) © Iskra Johnson

Last night I went for a walk to see if I was happy to be home, and I was. This city is so quiet people whisper in restaurants and you can hear the clouds scrape against the sky. There is the occasional disturbance, if you look for it. As I walked towards the bay I heard a raucous shrieking and looked up to see nine crows chasing a bald eagle. They kept going until I lost sight of them far beyond the edge of the park. Here at the frontier there is time to think and recollect. Every night I am dreaming of buildings, and then I wake up and plant peas and divide the baby lettuce. If you would like to know some of the places I went while in New York and the things I recommend here is a short list:

The Highline (Oh Seattle City Council, please please please, can we do this with five feet of the viaduct??)

DUMBO

The Met, Most especially the exhibit of Civil War photography, best viewed after getting lost for a few hours in the Cycladic art collection, just for historical perspective

MOMA, especially Dieter Roth’s “Later this will be nothing.” Also, I suggest having lunch there in the cafe for several hours while reading a novel, perhaps Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad”. People will be having very interesting conversations one eighth of an inch away from your elbow, mostly in “foreign” languages, but you may hear about the custom fireplace that very nice looking man is installing for those people with the third home on Fire Island. It’s taken him two years and it’s not yet done.

Gagosian Gallery, Anselm Kiefer’s new exhibit “The Morganthau Plan” And while you are there will you please pick up the book for me? It wasn’t in stock the first week. The other book, Next Year in Jerusalem, is crazy wonderful so I have to assume this one is too. If you see the stereoscopic displays of the Civil War scenes at the Met first it will make these paintings look very different. I think anybody planning to wage a war might want to stop in to these two exhibits before firing up the drones.

Rosanne Olson’s “Rapture” at Robin Rice Gallery. Sublime.

Central Park on a sunny day. There is no greater bliss. Blow a bubble for me.

Last Week to See Painters Under Pressure at Phinney Gallery

April 24, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

"Bird," Archival Pigment Print © Iskra Johnson — “Bird,” Archival Pigment Print © Iskra Johnson

This is the last week to see “Painters Under Pressure” at Phinney Gallery. The show comes down May 1. “Bird” is one of a dozen prints I have in the show. I do hope you will come by and see the work!

First formed as a Seattle Print Arts Salon Group, Painters Under Pressure has met for over 10 years to discuss and support the development of each others’ artwork. Each of us approach our printmaking from a painterly background and use the pressure of printmaking techniques to produce our varied styles of work. This exhibition brings together works resulting from the last 10 years of critique and camaraderie from these 6 artists: Ruth Hesse, Stephen MacFarlane, Tracy Simpson, Jon Taylor, Iskra Johnson, and David Owen Hastings.

Phinney Center Gallery Hours:
Monday – Friday 9am – 9pm
Saturday, 9am – 2pm

The Phinney Gallery
6532 Phinney Ave N
Seattle, WA 98103

Marking Time: Tracy Simpson and the Contemplative Art of Potato Printing

April 17, 2013 by Iskra 6 Comments

May Days Tracy Simpson — “May Days,” 18.5″ x 26″, Potato Print, Tracy Simpson

I have been looking for an opportunity to interview Tracy Simpson about her extraordinary potato print “calendars” for quite a while. As a member of the six-person print arts salon Painters Under Pressure, I have watched her work grow and evolve over the course of a decade. Just after opening our current salon exhibit at Phinney Gallery we had the time to sit down at length and talk about her process. What follows is a combination of conversation and correspondence.

From the beginning I have seen connections between your work and that of John Cage. Cage’s work evolved to be the product and process of impersonal systems of chance. This is one way in which he expressed his own sense of spirituality or “zen”: as a path of divorcing his work from the normal sense of self and identification of self with personal preference and personal history. Did this lead to automatism? Coldness? Abstraction only? Hard to say. His music can be aggressively difficult to listen to. But what always comes through to me in his writing, his visual art and his persona is not the automatic or the “no-self,” but a sense of empathy and embrace. There is a kindness in letting go of the personal identification with making art. It can be liberating.

Also, Cage’s work in music is all about time, and not-time, noise and not-noise. In marking time with the structure of a calendar you are indirectly noting its absence and its impending endings. Every month ends on a note, so to speak. The grid structure is not unlike a musical structure, a grid/signature/score with notation. The calendar is scoring the month, even as you physically score the paper. I am interested in how you have chosen a very impersonal structure, the eternal unchanging numbers and grid of the calendar and made it your system. Can you talk about that, about what is impersonal and what is not?

Seven Planets Tracy Simpson potato print — “Seven Planets,” 18″ x 24″, potato print © Tracy Simpson

You are right that time is about as impersonal as it gets; time stops for no one, it’s inexorable. And while we may individually have the sense now and again that time is standing still or speeds up for a bit, we know both are illusions or tricks of attention. You are also right that the way time is traditionally organized in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and so on, is impersonal. We really don’t get to say hey, I think I’ll step out of time in general or, I’m tired of how we collectively organize time and, really, my way is better so I’ll do that for awhile. For the most part, to exist in the world along with everyone else, we have to surrender to how our particular culture relates to time. So yes, in our culture there is a very set, impersonal structure that developed a long time ago that is partly related to the sun rising and setting and how the moon travels around the planet and partly related to what the collective consciously or unconsciously decided works.

I do like thinking about all that, stepping back and considering what is “natural” in terms of how we as humans relate to time and what we have constructed or imposed for convenience. And what I find even more interesting is how we interact with time. Not only is time the context in which everything happens for us as individuals and for us collectively, but I think there is nothing more personal than how we confront the inevitability of time passing whether it is during a given day or over the uncertain length of a lifetime. What has evolved for me with my art is an ongoing conversation about how I relate to time, its passage, anniversaries, the future, its apparent infinity and my obvious finiteness, how a moment in the morning may color another moment in the afternoon, how a moment in the evening may color my memory of a moment in the morning.

January Bamboo Tracy Simpson potato print — “January Bamboo,” 18″ x 26″, potato print, © Tracy Simpson

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