Iskra Fine Art

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You are here: Home / Archives for Architecture & Sense of Place

Book Launch! The Water Tower Project from Iskra Fine Art

June 30, 2025 by Iskra Leave a Comment


The Water Tower Project Book

In the long distance between this post and the last I have been single-mindedly focused on creating my first book: The Water Tower Project. I have always moved back and forth between word and image, and as time has passed the words have grown from notes in the margins of sketchbooks and social media into essays in their own right. The urgency of recent political events has sparked an idea that has been waiting to take shape since 2020. 

As a long-time designer of letterforms, I always look first to words and symbols to wrestle meaning out of chaos. During pandemic’s first months I created a series of 20 pieces of photographic art called The Water Tower Project. The water tower emerged as a symbol that evolved into an image; the form became a container into which I could pour my sense of disequilibrium, and hope to stumble into transformation. The water tower, hand-hammered, crafted by artisans, and hoisted to the city skyline, is the German Shepherd of industrial infrastructure. Noble, resilient, stoic, a timeless architectural archetype poised on the rooftop between heaven and earth. Judge or Witness? It is also a character and a canvas on which to project collective story.  

Five years post-2020, as we are confronted with a new order of global and national disruption, this series has become more relevant than ever. I have returned to the subject with three new pieces included in the book. The pages alternate between image and story, reflecting on parallel streams of politics, history, personal evolution and collective struggle as we move through unprecedented times.

Pandemic Barriers
A book is a thing you can hold in your hands. No intelligence but your own is required, and much as you might try to plug it in with the latest usb, it #resists – and insists you use your hands to turn the pages.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Photocollage, Photography, The Water Tower Project Tagged With: Iskra Books, Iskra Publishing, Iskra Writing, The Water Tower Project

Celebrate the Beauty of Swans: Holiday Print Sale, Twenty Percent off!

December 2, 2024 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Navigation ©Iskra Johnson

A big thank you to the friends and collectors who came out to my open studio and party November 16th! You made the year a great one, and work continues to go out the door, as those who could not make the open house stop by to visit. There were many requests for the swans to appear as cards, and as promised, they are now live, in The Swans Suite in my shop. All of the works are available as larger prints as well. A few of the swans are available only as larger prints. I may make a second Swans stationary collection as time goes on.

As a holiday thank you I am offering a 20% discount in my shop from now through the Solstice. If you have had your eye on a larger piece this is your chance to save big on any purchase over $150, cards excluded. Enter SOLSTICE24 at check out.

A note on upcoming price increases: Due to the inflation of costs for ink, paper and postage, I will be raising prices to catch up next year. This is one of your last chances to purchase cards at the current rate of 6 for $33

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Construction/Reconstruction, Photocollage, Print Sale, Prints Tagged With: 20 percent off print sale, bird stationary, swan art cards, swan prints

New Wabi Sabi Minimalism: Expressive Ink Painting Abstraction

November 10, 2023 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Inkstone and Brush

New Minimalist Modern Art for Interiors

I have long been in love with the idea of the Kakemono, or hanging scroll, that brings elegance to a vertical space in the home. These new pieces are created with washes of ink with brushes and other studio tools. The washes and calligraphic markings are then blended and composed digitally in improvisational sequences that suggest landscape, the memory of place and the moods of weather. A muted monochrome palette gives them a photographic feeling, and as with photographs they can be printed in warm tones or cool. The Kakemono form lends itself best to paper or fabric. I like to use a fine-grained slightly iridescent canvas from Hahnemuhle.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Abstract Calligraphy, Architecture & Sense of Place, Commissioned Art Tagged With: Art for Interiors, Commissioned art for interiors, Ink Painting Abstract, Minimalist Art, Wabi Sabi Painting

Seattle’s Waterfront Park Construction Project

April 3, 2023 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Waterfront Park with Wheel
I loved the Viaduct, a fact that is documented by acres of elegies, eulogies and shrines made in its honor. As one of its passionate defenders, I mourned when it came down for the as-yet unproven benefits of a “park” and an “underground tunnel.” The viaduct’s mood range was immense. Beneath its clumsy mastodon pillars one could wallow in the dank smells and charcoal smears of pure grime. Above, given a tenth of a gallon of gas and any class of car, a million dollar view rolled out from sea to shining sea and a white-capped mountain. It was our last glimpse of The View, as contrasted with our current life with an ever-diminishing View Corridor. We now see the world beyond the city in slivers, something blue or gray and moving slowly as atmosphere does, sliced against a block-long bank of windows that only reflect the sky and will never be it.

All that said, what a difference in perspective 10 years and a pandemic: Never again will I write eulogies to graffiti in the same way. Now that random scrawls are inescapable and cover every inch of our city with relentless self-regard I just want the power of a large hose filled with bleach and the god-powers of erasure. This shift in perspective hit me with bracing clarity as I stumbled into the Waterfront Park Construction project on a gray Sunday morning. With no hall monitors present, no generators, no growling excavators or men in hard hats shouting at me to leave or show my permit I had freedom to walk during Sunday matins like a slow monk observing, shooting, revising, studying every angle of scaffold and ramp and the lyric possibilities of fresh concrete. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture & Sense of Place, Photography Tagged With: graffiti, Seattle architectural photography, seattle renewal, seattle viaduct, Seattle Waterfront Park Construction

Disrupted Architecture: Studio Process and New Prints

November 18, 2021 by Iskra Leave a Comment

In the studio I have been returning to typographic practice in a new abstract way. These recent pieces are a mix of ink drawing, photography and collage composed with my process of digital alchemy. Buildings are big, the body is . . . human sized. These pieces consider scale, in terms of both architecture and maker. Largeness interrupted by the slightness of a memory, a figure, the intimate handprint of dirt and atmosphere and time. They continue the Construction/Reconstruction series based on construction sites and ruins and the blurred space in between.

In a break from my usual process I am beginning with pure drawing, using for my “brush” tools made of wood and steel that have hard edges designed for the work of construction. Working either from a photograph or memory I explore architectural space as I would a letterform: drawing the structure and drawing the air around it. Along the way I have found myself in the pure territory of composition, revisiting the lessons of Mondrian and the austerities of the Bauhaus.

The first set of images here show early studies that go back and forth between drawing and digital blending. The completed pieces that follow are all editioned as archival pigment prints. As with my other new media work they are not reproductions of paintings, but contemporary printmaking in which the print itself is the final art. 

New Typographics Process ink drawings

New Typographics Process ink drawings

As I scanned and deconstructed the original drawings I entered what I think of as a Mid-Century Modern Moment. Mondrian hovered at my shoulder and advised. It was a rigorous process of sacrifice and minimalisation that shaped his path from “drawing a tree” to knowing the space between branches. Although I always thought his older work was emotionally bloodless, the sense of mystery in his reductive methods stayed with me. Pieces like “Broadway Boogie Woogie” are as much a part of my DNA as formica and ashtray mosaics – and they come with a great soundtrack. By working with ink and soft absorbent papers incapable of truly hard edges I have invited the human element to re-surface. The piece below is as much about the sensual experience of paper as it is about the mind.

A Conversation with Mondrian, mid century style abstract
A Conversation with Mondrian, © Iskra Fine Art, archival pigment print, size variable

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture & Sense of Place, Digital Collage, Photocollage Tagged With: Building C Studios Open House, construction site art, disrupted architecture, Iskra Architectural Prints, new media architectural art

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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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