Iskra Fine Art

Memorial Day Letter (to a Fellow Gardener)

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I am sitting in my garden, appreciating the beauty of the layered leaves. The cloud cover is that particular shade of Memorial Gray, neither dingy nor celebratory, but softly understanding of all griefs, personal or military. In just four weeks the air will be perfumed with firecrackers yet now, with similar flags flying and jets crisscrossing overhead it is wistful with the scent of suntan oil still confined to its bottle and smoke from rain-dampened barbecue.

Earlier I took a walk along the shore where low tide exposed 5 feet of  barnacles white as tombstones and rank with rotting seaweed. Golden Gardens had been strung with nets and swarmed with the hopeful and half-dressed leaping and shouting and willing the ball to land on the right side. The glory of the season’s first bare feet, and sand rising in slow motion like salt spray around the players. Along the edge families shivered and fussed with potato salad and waited for heat to reach the searing stage, impatient for plates to fill and for conversation to become interesting. Miles away in a sea of asphalt the Veterans of Foreign Wars handed out red poppies and tried to explain poetry.

Flanders Field
Now, becalmed from half a mile of stairs and the discipline of the walk I do think I could spend a month or so just gazing at the Stewartia as it peels its bark and offers the miraculous evolution of blossom from polished green pearl to alabaster brooch to intricate ink-black pod. Right now it has almost everything on it at once except for the white flowers. When they fall they are purely nuisance. When they bloom it is a five-petaled rondeau that stops all thought but wonder. 

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Spotlight North Open Studios 2024 Available Work

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Magnolia Blossom, mixed media on panel 6 x 6″ ©Iskra Johnson

Spotlight North Open Studios 2024

I have been busy this month getting ready for Spotlight North Open Studios, showcasing the work and studios of artists in Shoreline, Lake City and North Seattle. This is our third year, and it has been exciting to see attendance grow. The 2024 map is now up on the Spotlight website for planning your visit. This year’s tour has nine locations and ten artists, each with a very different way of working. Each week recent work and an artist profile is featured on our Instagram.

A gallery show is usually a consistent theme and subject matter. An open studio on the other hand allows an artist to show old work and new, and to share the process of how change evolves. In 2022 I focused mostly on prints and my botanical cards. Cards and prints will be available this year but I will also be showing drawings, paintings and mixed media pieces, many of them framed. Most of the work is small and very affordable, ranging from $175-$600 depending on size, medium and frame style. This newsletter shows a portion of the work available, and if you are interested in a piece and would like to inquire about price and put it on reserve please send me a note. Pieces that have pre-sold are not listed.

Mixed Media Studio Process: Juxtapositions

The spring has been a creative time of working in many media. I have always been interested in juxtapositions and technical media experiments of phenomena. Some of these explorations have become what I am calling “Quartets” of individual panels that form a single painting. My career in advertising and publishing was an omnivore’s life, always embracing new languages and means of expression. I love screaming orange, neon green and tasteful neutrals. Futura Bold and Spencerian script. Purely from a process point of view it is a great gift to take the time to look at the influences, absorb the languages of style and give each voice its time on stage. 

As I’ve gone through my archives I’ve found pieces to revisit with a fresh eye and sometimes hair-raising refinements (what was that color I mixed five years ago? Can I keep on drawing over a final varnish?). Some of these pieces are on paper and will be traditionally framed, but others are mounted on panel and floated. I have always reveled in the freedom of working on paper, but glass can create a sense of distance between the viewer and the art. It has been satisfying to embrace the craft of framing and find just the right alternate forms of presentation. 

Equilibrium, calligraphic abstract on paper, mounted to panel. 8 x 8" in 10" frame
Equilibrium, calligraphic abstract on paper, mounted to panel. 8 x 8″ in 10″ frame

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Iskra Fine Art Spring Shows 2024: Save the Date!

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The SweeperThe Sweeper, from Like Mother, curated by Kelly Lyles

The big sleep of winter seems to have abruptly ended this week, with 70 degrees predicted Sunday! Along with the bloom of forsythia and plum there are 3 spring exhibits ahead. 

Like Mother No. 11 at Kirkland Art Center

I hope to see you at the opening of the newest (11th!) iteration of Like Mother at Kirkland Art Center Friday March 22nd, from 6-9. Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Thursday 11-4, Saturday 11-2. Address: 620 Market Street, Kirkland WA 98033. 

This version of the exhibit includes several new artists. As interesting as the art are the stories accompanying the work. For me the process of making the three collages in the show was a remedy for grief and a joyful exploration. Being the daughter of a controversial public figure is not always easy. I knew a very different, private version of my mother, and these three collages reflect that view. After my mother’s death in 2019 I began going through her archives. She saved every letter and every document of rites of passage, and these are the artifacts I used to honor her memory.“The Sweeper” (above) depicts Ginny at 3, the youngest and last child in a family of 5, left to entertain herself in a big house mostly emptied of children. The light is the constant sun of California, in the formal rooms of the family home in Redwood City, where her father was mayor.

Governing Verbs (The Nun)Governing Verbs (The Nun) [Read more…]

New Forest Card Designs and Sketching the Future

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Black and White Windows Sketchbook

The New Year has come in with a roar of ice, snow, rain and broken pipes. It seemed fitting to learn to mix the colors of January, although washing paint out of my brushes has been difficult with frozen pipes! Above is the first spread of my new industrial sketchbook, through which I hope to learn to paint some of my many obsessions: backs of trucks, kiosks, factories and scaffolds and the ever changing sky which they reflect. To move myself from the digital world fully into the work of paint I have joined the #InsightCreative30DayChallenge2024, brilliantly guided by Cheryl Taves. I met Cheryl about 4 years ago when I visited her studio with friends on Vancouver Island. Her studio and process was a revelation, and I knew I wanted to continue a connection. Through her coaching at Insight Creative, the Sketchbook Challenge brings together artists from all over the world to create audience and accountability for taking risks and finding ones own vision. [Read more…]

Armchair Travel: Notes on Britain and Rory Pilgrim’s RAFTS

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The Slough Monoprint by Iskra
The Slough, Unique Transfer Print

“I think one of the most precious things we can do is also think about dreaming or the imagination as a support structure. It is something that is rudimental to our existence.” Rory Pilgrim

When I was 10 my brothers and I built a raft. I have no memory of how we started, although I suspect it was from laziness:  a derelict half-boat set adrift by some other sailor on the lake and found by us among the pontoons. We captured it just in time to lash the rotting planks back together and haul new wood from land to make it last another summer. I can see us wading waist deep, hammering, knotting rope, balancing on one foot and falling into the lake, and somewhere in the vivid picture of the waves and the light glinting is a thick red book bobbing against the wood like a tiny tugboat. Books do not float, so I do not know how this could be. But there was a book, it was red, and it was discussed. There was some acknowledged mystery, and I am sure if I asked either of my brothers what book it was and what author they would say they remembered nothing but the pages: how limp they were with the weight of water but how the book refused to sink.

Tonight, contemplating travel across an ocean, I sat down to confront paralysis about my itinerary in England. Every week I stare at maps; I draw [Read more…]