Iskra Fine Art

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Seattle Print Arts Salon Meeting at Ruth Hesse Studio

February 22, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Tonight Painters Under Pressure, my SPA salon, met at the studio of Ruth Hesse. In addition to being talented printmakers and artists this group of 7 is rousingly funny and has an appreciation for food and politics, both of which take up at least some part of our monthly meetings before we get to the central business of sharing and critiquing our work. I will be doing a detailed profile on the salon at a later time.

This post is an alert to those who may not have heard that Ruth is having her fabulous annual print sale this weekend. Ruth’s East Magnolia studio is tucked into a marine area in view of the water and a dazzling maze of industrial stuff. I’ve got to go back in the daylight. This is an area I have never been to and it seems like a whole mysterious city-behind-the-city that I had never known existed. You can get a map and directions to the studio here. The sale will be from 2-6 on Sunday February 26th, with prices ranging from $35 to $1,000. Below, some quick cellphone snaps of her work and space.

Ruth-Hesse-Prints

Ruth-Hesse-in-Studio

See more of Ruth Hesse’s work at her website.

“Often, my prints live in my To Be Continued folder, where they germinate until I have the right combination of colors and textures to layer on top of them. I live for the moment when discordant elements come together to make something unpredictable and beautiful.  That’s what excites me about monotype.

Life is a layering of experiences, be they planned, spontaneous, embarrassing, proud, painful or sublime.  Without that layering, there’s no depth.  There’s great hope in accepting the difficult stages in life (or the life of a print), placing faith in the process that everything will turn out okay in the end.” –R. Hesse

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Ruth Hesse open studio, SPA Salons

Hilo, the Big Island, Just Before the Rain

February 21, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Architectural-Drawing-Hilo-Hawaii
Hilo, © Iskra Johnson, charcoal dust and water, 15" x 19"

If you would like to see this drawing in person it is currently available at Prographica Gallery.

Filed Under: Drawing Tagged With: Atmospheric charcoal drawing of buildings, Charcoal Drawing of Hilo Hawaii

Opening of Black & White Show at Fraker Scott

February 17, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Opening night of The Black & White Show at Fraker Scott with Wanda Pelayo, in February of 2012. Part of the sequence from Drawings in Dust is on the Wall behind.

 Iskra At Black &White Show Opening

Filed Under: Drawing, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past

Is Bremerton The New Brooklyn? Many Reasons to Visit The CVG Show 2012

January 17, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Ok, ok, I know Burien has been fighting for this title, (and in fact it may not even be relevant, since I am told by some that China, the entire nation, is the new Williamsburg, and who cares about Brooklyn anyway, aren’t we over the USA??), but I would like to take this opportunity to point out that Bremerton has pretty much everything you need in a burgeoning arts community, and much to make its preening big sister to the east jealous.

This is a town where you can still find an affordable home, median price $199K. It’s a place where nature rules, and with considerable drama: In 2010 two bald eagles fighting over a fish knocked out power on Pleasant Avenue, electrocuting one bird in the process. It’s a place where you can spend the night at an upscale bed and breakfast or opt for a romantic and educational sleepover on an actual Navy destroyer from the Vietnam War. You can also see bits of submarines embedded in one of the fabulous waterfront parks, which features fountains that, through a feat of sculptural alchemy, become salmon swimming upstream. You can join the United States Marines and defend our nation in that honorable fashion, or get yourself a studio and make a whole lotta art and defend your aesthetic at the CVG  Show, a rare state-wide juried competition with serious prize money at stake, hosted by Bremerton’s Collective Visions Gallery.

Yes, this is not just a travelogue, but an invitation to visit the CVG Show, which opens January 29th, and which I am honored to be part of. Friends Paula Gill, Jennifer Carrasco and Laura Brodax will also be represented, with pieces that are not to be missed. Kathleen Moles, curator at the LaConner Museum of Northwest Art selected 137 works from nearly 800 submitted. There will be many community events in conjunction with the exhibit. Details can be found at Collective Visions Gallery.

Glen Davis, photographer, graciously granted permission to use his portraits of the Bremerton waterfront. It truly is a marvel, and well worth the trip, even if you don’t make it to the show.

BremertonWaterfrontPArk

BremertonWaterfrontFountain

© Glen Davis, Legendary Portraits of Manette

Filed Under: Art Reviews, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past Tagged With: artist community in Bremerton, Collecive Visions Gallery Show, CVG show 2012, CVG Show in Bremerton, Iskra in CVG show, juried shows in Washington state, northwest art in Bremerton, reasons to go to Bremerton

Drawing in Hard Times: Occupying the News at My Kitchen Table

January 12, 2012 by Iskra

Drawing Flowers at my Kitchen Table

Back in the first January after the Crash of September 18, 2008, I was one of many who found themselves bewildered and petrified by the cascade of economic events beyond their control. I don’t need to go into personal details, (just google “auction rate securities + fraud+ retirement savings”) except to note that it did seem that all pillars of safety were falling, most especially the capitalist system — a system I had relied upon as a professional designer to put food on the table. By January I had spent four months archiving, updating, shaking the known trees, and banging my head on a small flat stone. With the phone-line to the capitalist world apparently dead I sat for many long hours at my kitchen table immobilized and staring into the abyss.

In this state I began to read newspapers with a grim scavenger obsession: what had fallen in the last hour? What was next? Who was suffering the most? And that is when I began to clip out the faces of bankers. Through no fault of their own they were all men. I began to draw them. Mr. Goldman Sachs, Mr. Arrested at 4 AM in his red sweatshirt, Mr. I Am Not Either Guilty. Oh, and one woman, Ms. Software Oligarch, in her perfect mannish Nehru shirt. I moved on to men shouting (mostly coaches) and men playing baseball. All this complicity, all this power and rage, captured in the sweet, soft, smudgy newsprint. At a certain point I couldn’t stand it anymore. I bought some tulips and turned the sketchbook around and started drawing petals and leaves, thinking, what will it be like when faces and flowers meet in the middle? And what is the masculine, and what is the feminine, what is this all about?

It was technically a wonderful exercise in how to use colored pencil, which I had never tried before. It was soothing, slow, patient work, perfectly suited to the intimate space of the kitchen. And emotionally it was revelatory. To shift from one subject to another, from livid anger to botanical grace over the course of the day, brought me a measure of equanimity. It also dealt with one of my favorite subjects in art, the Real and the Unreal. The ardent tulip was unequivocally real, the newspaper, not-so-much. Although I was using exactly the same materials for both there were subtle shifts in perception as the subject changed.

Revisiting the sketchbook in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street Movement I found a few other drawings I had forgotten: the innocents, the lost players, the embarrassingly earnest. It seems the theme of power and powerlessness, of crumbling security and tidal economic changes, of the need for refuge, are not going away anytime soon. For millions the world is far more shaky than it was in that first dreadful year after the crash.

Bank-Criminal-1

Mr.-I'm-Not-Guilty

TulipPencilDrawingWithColor

Tulip Leaves Colored Pencil Drawing

Shouting man sketch by Iskra

Coah shouting drawing by Iskra

Her Speller Number 45, drawing by Iskra THe Fan, colored pencil drawing by Iskra

The-Catcher Pencil Drawing in Moleskine

Of Flowers and Men. Selections from a personal sketchbook, colored pencil and lead pencil on Moleskine. (Click to enlarge.)

Filed Under: Drawing, Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals Tagged With: artist personal Moleskine sketchbook, colored pencil journal, drawing flowers in colored pencil, drawing from the newspaper, iskra moleskine journal, Portrait of a recession, portraits of Occupy Wallstreet

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Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: I added baking soda to my gesso. Pretty wild texture here, not sure yet how stable it is. You can see the test of the edges in the second piece— the rugged edge only works if I get a pristine background and unfortunately the tape I used to mask it did not work consistently. Hello tape, my old friend and nemesis. You work differently on every surface. These little barn structures give me great comfort as the bigger structures of our government and nation seem to be crumbling.
Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the fields somewhere, on the road to Edison. Acrylic on prepared ground, sketchbook.
MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai We MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei at Seattle Art Museum.
I am thinking this morning about the phrase Americ I am thinking this morning about the phrase American Heartland. Learning to paint a barn means studying the neutrals. Our political discourse has pitted the barn people against the city people and there are no neutrals, just shouting. But if you walk out into the horizon lands, all you hear is the wind and a kestrel. Walk in boots, hard-pressed against your toes, walk on stubble barefoot and get acupuncture for a lifetime. Study the intervals: how the clouds can be in the upper one third neatly or one sixth, precarious, the future disappearing with the sun as it falls making the barn your whole world if you’re three years old and looking up; one big triangle with a square in the center, and so many mysteries inside the square. 

There is also the question of what kind of light seeps between the verticals and is the light coming in the evening or at midday when you can finally begin to make out all the other tiny squares within the big square, which would be called hay. Reach for the rope and swing out over the canyon, that great big canyon from bale to bale.

Collage studies: painting neutrals
A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yor A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yorker this morning, about the global population crash. This will upend urbanism, for sure, though it will very good for veterinarians and dog groomers:
“Only two communities appear to be maintaining very high fertility: ultra-Orthodox Jews and some Anabaptist sects. The economist Robin Hanson’s back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that twenty-third-century America will be dominated by three hundred million Amish people. The likeliest version of the Great Replacement will see a countryside dotted everywhere with handsome barns.”
First Thursday. Such a beautiful night. First Thursday. Such a beautiful night.

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