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The Happiness Project and Drawing Dreams

December 6, 2009 by Iskra Leave a Comment

The-Little-Ice-Cream-ManThis summer I was approached by an organization called Drawing Dreams to contribute artwork to their new Berkley-based non-profit that provides art supplies to children’s hospitals. In appreciation of their support, donors to the organization are given cards made from work by the site’s artists. It is a pretty stunning group of artists and I am honored to be part of the group. You can see my featured piece, called Be Happy, and other works by contributing artists here.

Filed Under: Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past Tagged With: Drawing Dreams, happiness project, transfer prints

Coffee With Man’s Ears in Morning Light

November 27, 2009 by Iskra 1 Comment

This morning I went to a cafe (my favorite, Fresh Flours) to inhale newsprint and caffeine and find the happiness image of the day. This man’s lovely cup-shaped ears were irresistible. On the other side of my table a gentleman looked up from his laptop and asked what I was doing and why I was photographing the back of a chair. When I told him that I was going out each day to look for an image of transcendent happiness he immediately logged onto Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project website and showed me that somebody else has been busy on this subject for quite some time. Where have I been all of my life? If you haven’t visited, do, she is quite wonderful, and her account of her year studying the theories of happiness has generated huge response and warmth worldwide.

Coffee-With-Mans-Ears
© Iskra Johnson

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: can caffeine make you happy?, Coffee in the morning, photograph of the day, seattle coffee, The Happiness Project

Walking Meditation

October 21, 2009 by Iskra 2 Comments

I have been visiting the lake often in this early Autumn. The season has changed and has scrubbed this magic circle bare of fun-lovers and tourists. The colors are quiet, the birds now own the diving platform and the reeds. The mothers, the strollers, the nature stalkers and the brooding contemplatives are left to themselves to notice what they see.

I have been thinking a lot about the nature of “Photographicness.” The camera’s eye is so irreducibly clear and the screen so translucent. It seems more real than real. And yet when the artifact of this seeing makes its transition unaltered to paper it goes through a metamorphosis. In some ways it seems to die. The more “real” something is the more I recognize it. And the more quickly I look away, as though I “know” what it has to tell me already.  So I have been experimenting with subtraction, reduction and what happens when you modify a photographic image through the alchemy of transfer printing. This first image is an image that lives in digital form only. The second one is an archival pigment transfer on Lustro Dull Cover.

Stair-Study-Walking-Meditation

Stair-And-Cloud-Greenlake
Stair and Cloud, © Iskra Johnson

 

Filed Under: Photography, Transfer Prints Tagged With: Art about Greenlake, Cloud reflection, Pigment transfer print, walking Meditation

Reclaiming the Jet Stream | Remembering 9.11

September 11, 2009 by Iskra 1 Comment

ReclaimingTheJetStreamSeptember11
© Iskra Johnson

I’m thinking today about impermanence, about flight, about how still the skies were in the absence of jets. How crystalline beautiful the days were that Autumn, with a sky razor blue and all the senses alert. This morning I went running on a ridge where I could see the mountains and the bay. Dappled light, birdsong, the marvel of flowers I’d never seen before.

And yet I found myself remembering. Today’s sky was blue, but that other sky is trapped in amber, and I carry it with me.

Filed Under: Transfer Prints Tagged With: 9/11, crane, Elegy for September 11, flight path, jet stream, origami, September eleven

Lake Light

August 27, 2009 by Iskra Leave a Comment

LakeLight_Transfer_Print
Transfer print on watercolor paper. © Iskra Johnson

Filed Under: Transfer Prints Tagged With: Art about Greenlake, light i art, prints, Seattle printmakers, summer themes in art, works on paper

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the creative process | conversations with artists | the contemplative impulse in art

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Morning pages. Reading Wallace Stevens’ ‘13 wa Morning pages. Reading Wallace Stevens’ ‘13 ways of looking at a blackbird’ for the thousandth time and finding it completely new.
Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the sol Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the solitude of taking in a place with every one of our senses, unmitigated by the relational bypass legislated by the need to tend to whether the Other is: okay/happy/comfortable/entertained etc…? Tonight I’m sharing notes on my (new) dedicated weekly visit to the travel state of mind, in which I go somewhere in public as though I was a tourist and read and write and armchair travel. 

I love company, don’t get me wrong. I have traveled with, and without. Evenings are not always at ease. In 1990 I went to a Typography Conference in Oxford. Dropped my luggage a week ahead and took a train to the Lakes. Me and every honeymooning couple of the year, in 19th century bed and breakfasts (all booked by pre-internet postal and phone call.) Horsehair mattresses, pineapple-carved bedposts. Two other non-honeymooning people were allowed into the 40-mile square Lakes that month. They did not make eye contact. 

So it was me and Beatrix Potter, and the “jacket potato”, an unfortunate menu staple that involved baked beans + baked potatoes (in far too close proximity) alone with our observations writing letters home to whichever boyfriend it was left behind. (Here I gracefully omit the grand ball under the tent on the Thames back at the conference and everything that happened after. . .) The Thames is why the British invented elipses. 

I had told myself on some errant Tuesday that England was the size of Whidbey Island. It was a rare lapse, in which I completely forgot: world history? Oh, wait, the Beatles. + King Arthur. Stones and tables and swords. Forgive me while I go re-watch the intro to #Outlander….

Daunting to study the guidebook and realize I should have started this project when I was 11. I have been to England three times. I cannot fathom how I thought I could go again and not want to see everything: every cathedral, flea market, moody moor, outsider mural and Arabic bakery, cinematically filtered through a modern mashup of Virginia Woolf and Peaky Blinders.
Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I fi Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I find myself sometimes seeking very simple places to land. What better place to land then water? In the series of architectural works in progress one of my subjects is the Chittenden Locks. You can’t have the locks without the water that lives to be raised and lowered. These subtle tethers between invisible guide posts and unseen actors offstage speak to me not just of infrastructure and industry, but of our connections to one another. 

I live in a city that has decided resolutely that Zoom is the same as actual conversation. The model embraced here is “if it looks good, as a facsimile, it’s probably good enough.” What a loss for all of those who have spent a lifetime in a craft perfecting real things. Serif, proportion, texture, text— all made visible through touch. One tug of a rope, one breath of wind, and this whole image redesigns itself. With photographic art I can make images without ever smearing paint or lifting out. I touch with my eyes and mind. What makes it human is metaphor. What keeps you tethered to this world, and to others?
Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and archi Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and architecture. This piece harkens to another time. Old world rotogravure, lithography, the specimen studies of explorers first seeing the tropics, or the to-them “new world.” Also to the early psychedelic history of Seattle, where if your UW professor was missing in class he might be sitting in one of the mythic cedars at Volunteer Park, or cactus gazing in the steamy other-world of the conservatory. It was a magical time, and the park was the incandescent center. 

The way I work is by deconstructing the real into many subtle layers of color and tint and tone, and then recomposing as though each piece of photographic information was a plate. In my architectural images and botanical work a piece like this can go back-and-forth for a long time between realism and atmosphere and I never know until the very last step exactly where it will land.
Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by candlelight.
Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions: 

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?

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