Iskra Fine Art

At Sea

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This morning I woke up with the sea on my mind. A memorial was held this week for the intrepid sailing couple from Seattle, Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle. They were killed by Somali pirates, an unthinkable and yet now-common occurrence in our new/old world in which any nightmarish thing you could dream of is probably happening right now.

I did this image several years ago in commemoration of the Indonesian tsunami. I have always loved the origami paper boat, and I did a series called  “Rescue” juxtaposing the fragility of  paper with the inexorable power of the sea. “At Sea” emerged with an unexpected martial feeling. The paper boat sits in puzzle piece lock-up with what could be the tail of a military transport plane. The foreground image may be in the act of rescue, or it may be on attack. And that is very much how the world feels to me this morning. The lock-up of war and peace is inextricable, relentless, eternal. We make our fragile boats, place them on the water, and head towards the light at the curve of the horizon, regardless of what happens next.

Blue-Origami
At Sea, printing ink on prepared ground,© Iskra Johnson

Choro Loco! New works about listening to music…..

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The other night I went to a concert of Choro music at The Chapel, a hidden gem of a concert venue. My friend Jere Smith, an artist in good standing at  the good Shepherd Center, introduced me to this exquisitely calibrated performance space. Phenomenal acoustics and an architecture of reverential mystery: you don’t forget your listening moments here. I was completely swayed by Choro Loco and it’s dedicated cast of musicians on clarinet, accordion, guitar and triangle. I have never seen a clarinetist undulate like smoke– who knew this was a sexy instrument???

I got into that music space, where notes take color-shape and the 1930’s blend with 1910 and future-perfect and perfect-past  in five languages. Remembrances of tango, waltz, polka, and sophisticated new-music grooves all interwoven into a heady eutophia — that’s utopia mixed with euphoria in case you haven’t yet been. Soon I pulled out my cell-phone, and started photographing in the low-res light. Herewith the first three prints in a new series called Choro: Listening to Music. All source material: Droid photos. Alcohol gel prints on Arches 88.

Music-StandPiano-MusicPiano-Music2 © Iskra Johnson

First Image of the New Year: The Golden Bird + Thoughts on Mixed Media

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On New Years morning a Varied Thrush made a rare appearance in the bare maple above the pond. I photographed him through the window and a few hours later made a transfer print from the photograph onto layers of metallic silver, gold and luminescent white. I made four prints, each time trying new ways of burnishing the transparency. I found that by spraying water on the actual transparency material I could get a feeling of old world mezzotint–with no control. Then I started brushing the painted paper with water instead, using varying pressure to gradually adhere the ink with more fidelity to the plate.

I have a new Epson 3880 and it behaves very differently from the 2400. Previously I used alcohol to make transfers, but it left a thin skin on the paper resistant to subsequent overlays. The ability to transfer with water alone is exciting–no toxic fumes, and the surface is lovely, much more like silkscreen. I am finding that the transfer film has to sit for at least ten minutes after it comes out of the printer–it seems that the ink then “cures”  and lifts more readily to water or to an acrylic medium, like opaque matte gel.

In photographic mixed media work I am looking for an immediacy of narrative in which I can look onto my world, capture it, and engage in a process that reveals more about the experience than I “know” in the moment. It is intimate and magical because through the process of pulling the print I can slow time down and go back to the initial glimpse of the experience of the “real,” of what I thought I saw– before it has been given language. For this afternoon I felt as not that I was looking through glass at a bird, but that I perched in the tree, privileged to visit the first bright day of the new year with the bird’s own eyes.

The-Golden-Bird
The Golden Bird, Transfer print on metallic paint, © Iskra Johnson

  Close-Up-Birds-Head
Head detail, from another version

The Manganese Day

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Winter_Trees
Winter Trees, brayer print, © Iskra Johnson

(The piece above is in indigo, not manganese but close on the colorwheel)  

It’s been a long slog here in Seattle, buried in Paynes’ grey, and so today when manganese appeared in the western sky with tints of Maxfield Parrish cloud-happy-white one could not help but feel elated and at peace simultaneously. I went over to visit a painter friend who just incidentally has a studio overlooking the sky, a copse of urban trees, a hill, various houses, and what she described as “my version of Vermont.” We stared in raptness. Blue through bare branches: mitered, metered, salvaged, savored.

She only uses the real manganese, still made by Old Holland. We must have devoted at least half an hour to discussing pigment variability, granulation, viscosity, and the reinvention of Winsor & Newton, which she demonstrated to my complete amazement has NO color shift. (This means you can paint a nose in perfect flesh color on Tuesday and come back six months later and get back to the lower lip with no fear of dry paint not matching wet.) In between discussing paint we talked about The Idea of Vermont. This is a place where they never say “let’s do lunch.” They simply drag you out of your cabin through six foot snow-drifts for cabbage and a roast. Lord, I like those people. They have woodpiles and flannels, and wool-ruddy cheeks made that way through sheer scratchiness, which they never complain about. I myself am a complainer, which is why I live on the west coast, but dream about the other.

I stared out of the studio window, mesmerized. It really was Vermont. A sense of place so palpable you just wanted to pull out your rocking chair and never leave. And yet also here, and so: placeless. I have been stationed for quite a while at ground level, and it made me long for flights of stairs and lands unseen, for distance. Here, a view from close-up. Brayer print and charcoal on paper.

House and Tree,mixed media,Iskra
House and Tree, printing ink and charcoal, 8″ x 11″