Iskra Fine Art

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Iskra in Icon Show at Fraker/Scott

August 26, 2011 by Iskra Leave a Comment

I hope you will come down to Pioneer Square this first Thursday to the opening of the juried “Icon” show at Fraker/Scott Gallery. The show will be up for a month, with a reception for the artists and an awards ceremony on Saturday, September 24 from 5-7 PM. The gallery is located at 121 Prefontaine Pl. S  in the Tashiro Kaplan building (425.883-4633.)

My piece is a collage transfer print created from a recent photoshoot in the Duwamish industrial area.  It is both an homage to one of the great emblems of modern engineering, the Hydrant, and a record of one day, captured and layered in collage-space.

Hydrant
©Iskra Johnson "Relic" Photocollage transfer print on panel

 

Filed Under: Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Photography Tagged With: art about industrial themes, art in the Duwamish, FrakerScott Icon show, icons in modern art, industrial icons in art, Iskra gallery shows, photo image of hydrant, prints about fire hydrants, transfer print photocollage

In Retreat: Off to the Edge

August 25, 2011 by Iskra

I’ve been mostly absent from the blog this summer, focused on making new experimental work. This weekend I am going to Port Townsend for the Artist Trust Edge Program. (Thank you Artist Trust!)  It is galvanizing to know that I will be spending a full week with other artists in various disciplines, with one focus, absent from my inbox, outbox and the nonstop noise of the news cycle that sits at my fingertips everytime I sit at the computer. The news DOES fuel my work in many ways, but how many disasters can a person absorb? How many quakes, hurricanes, droughts, civil wars, and general geopolitical tragedy???

It will be good be out of the city and nearer the mountains, and to sense Canada near by. This week I saw Herzog’s movie  Cave of Forgotten Dreams and I have been dreaming every night since in charcoal and firelight. This year I have been absorbed in technology and photography, and it creates a huge pause to see that movie. I have memorized the horses’ faces, and the overlapping profiles of the cave lions. France seems very old, and Canada and the North seems somehow connected to an older time.

I am working on a series of images using abraded surfaces and found textures that show time’s passage. This one features the much beloved traffic cone, beseiged.

TrafficConePrint
© Iskra Johnson "Geopolitical"

 

Filed Under: Transfer Prints Tagged With: art about maps, art with traffic cone, geopolitical art

Earthquake Preparedness

August 25, 2011 by Iskra Leave a Comment

In the wake of all the little quakes and big ones to come, here is an offering.

Conserve-LaCalma
© Iskra Johnson, Transfer print on Arches 88, 21" by 13"

 

Filed Under: Transfer Prints Tagged With: earthquake poster, iconic art, transferprint collage

Summerlight

July 17, 2011 by Iskra Leave a Comment

This is the summer of endless elegy. The forms and colors of winter persist even as the sun comes out for a day or two and temperatures climb above 70. The newly planted vine maple is already turning red and I have not yet gone swimming. Only the foxgloves have been jubilant; this is the year I realized they aren’t weeds and let them go wild, a pearl and purple trumpet section playing throughout the garden.

SummerlightTransferPrint
Summerlight, transfer print, © Iskra Johnson

This transfer print blends the layers of sunlight past with autumn’s melancholies. The echinacea laid its stems at my feet last October. The sunlight came from my favorite yellow wall at 85th and Greenwood, photographed in 2009, recently graffitied with a luscious red heart and then abruptly painted beige. I am glad I captured its past life in my archives.

I am focusing on transfer prints exclusively right now, enraptured with the tools of the camera and the newest version of Photoshop. I am in that place where you try absolutely everything and sit back dazzled, and then subtract ninety percent of the possible, in search of the necessary. I’ll be moving back and forth all summer between two very different themes: the garden, and the street. The hard urban surfaces seem to need the antidote of what grows from the watering can and dirt. See more of these images in the gallery The Natural World

 

Filed Under: Photocollage, Photography, The Garden, Transfer Prints Tagged With: art as elegy, Iskra transfer prints

Blue Sky in Seattle,Listening to Charles Lloyd on KBCS Caravan

May 17, 2011 by Iskra

This morning, with blue sky coming up through the mists outside the studio window, I am listening to Charles Lloyd on KBCS. Thank you John Gilbreath for the Caravan. Every morning from nine to noon I am in a groove sublime. This piece by Lloyd takes me to a time when the world seemed bright, and everything possible:

Baroque_Morning_Charles_Lloyd

 
 Baroque Morning, printing ink on paper, from Sleep Studies

Filed Under: Painting Tagged With: art inspired by music, blue sky in Seattle, KBCS the Caravan with John Gilbreath, Listening to Charles Lloyd

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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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