Artist Studio Visits Archives - Page 3 of 3

New Directions in Contemplative Art: Conversations with Artists

October 13, 2012 by Iskra 2 Comments

Iconography_Drawing — “Help Along the Way” Mixed Media Drawing, © Iskra Johnson

This week I am launching a new series of occasional interviews with artists working in the contemplative/devotional traditions. Many of these artists work within the rich iconography of Buddhism, and specifically with the image of the Buddha. Historically the Buddha is represented as a figure of serene composure, elegance and grace. The eyes look inward, closed or downward cast, the shoulders curve gently into hands held in perfect mudra. A careful ritualized mathematics guides the distance between folds in the Buddha’s robes and the size and placement of snails on his head. The surface is stone-hard or wood, impenetrable.

This is a statue, not a man–and certainly not a woman, although Greek influence gives his robes a lyrical sweep and his body is not the emaciated one of early more ascetic representations. Not just the province of practicing “Buddhists,” the Buddha image lives ubiquitously in the contemporary marketplace of imagery and ideas. The popular shorthand for “Buddhism” is the relinquishment of desire and a state of serene acceptance, exemplified by the immobile statue. The statue is an ideal. What happens when society fills its spiritual landscape with an image of an ideal rather than a real?

It sets up a struggle, a dichotomy, hazardous and blessed in equal measure. The essence of devotional art is an image and an ideal larger than the human capacity to realize. It is aspirational. And in aspiration is a keen and particular form of suffering: you never get there, you are always leaning towards, but never reaching. Modern life, at least as practiced in America, is about getting there: and it is about getting. There is grasping and a kind of avarice in that. As well, a valuable practical truth and wisdom. The democratic revolutions tumbled the monarchies: we can all consider ourselves kings, queens, or at least the head of our local precinct caucus. Darwin, driving a nail into holy hierarchies, established that we might be on a less than mystical trajectory from birth to death and nowhere does he tell us if the soul is an acquired or inherited trait. Given the melting ice caps we don’t know if we or the sutras will be here in 2020. It is only logical to say: why not now? Why not me? Why can’t I understand in my own terms, and right now, — quickly?

The membrane between the modern urgency to leap efficiently from aspiration to getting and a deeper, timeless and more thoughtful understanding is being explored by the artists, writers and other creators reinventing religious iconography on their own terms. Some of them continue in the lineage of traditional forms, repositioning them in modern environments. Others take the sly point of view, working in illustration and advertising, and others work from the ground up re-inventing the very iconographic forms, with their own personal and aesthetic mathematics. Irony is rare, and to me this is a welcome blessing. These artists are not afraid to wear their aspiration on their sleeve. They may risk condescension and accusations of blasphemy from the spiritual establishments, and incomprehension from the secular consumer, and yet they continue on.

As someone who has followed the Buddhist path– with some detours– for most of my adult life, I want to talk to these people. The Buddha image in particular has huge resonance for me. I have done and continue to do visual art, or what I think of more properly as contemplative practice, that incorporates the image of the Buddha. This practice has led me towards viewing my own art making, regardless of the subject, as an extension of contemplation, primarily motivated by a desire for insight, beauty and emotional ballast, and secondarily as an object in the marketplace. I look forward to visiting the studios and work of artists with a similar perspective, and to seeing the varieties of ways in which their practice takes form.

Please check back from time to see the latest artists interviewed in the category of “The Mystic Muse“, or subscribe to receive this blog in your mailbox.

My companion in travels, the plug-in-‘88 Toyota-cigarette-lighter-laughing-while-driving-Buddha. Factory made in a high-stress environment by card-carrying atheists, no doubt.

Studio Visit with Richard Kehl, Poet and Scout

June 30, 2012 by Iskra 15 Comments

In the beginning, which is to say about three minutes ago, after the invention of the wheel but before there were scanners and i-phones and computers, there was the book, the magazine, and the scissors. And there were people who collected stuff, and cut it up. The word “de-clutter” had not been invented, and you could still find magical things in fleamarkets, which had not yet been scraped bare by scavengers from Ebay. There were people who didn’t live to throw stuff away or shrink it to a thumb drive, they lived instead to adore the object, to gather ephemera, to let all the fabulous detritus of culture float about them and settle into new order. In this way was born the art of modern collage. Friday I was privileged to spend a morning visiting the studio of one of the very best collage artists of today, Richey Kehl.

I put him in my personal pantheon of the collage greats, with Romare Bearden and Tadanori Yokoo. Kehl’s work is nostalgic and elegiac, exquisitely decorative, but also dizzying in its leaps of association. I studied with him briefly when he taught at the University of Washington, and will never forget his epic slideshow. A kind of whole brain-boot-camp experience, this transcendent hour in the dark with yes, a slide projector, inhaled you at one end as a rational if anxious student struggling just to “learn how to paint” and spit you out at the other end almost enlightened. The seemingly random image sequences had no explainable logic, and yet stirred your unconscious to a sense of exhilaration and purpose. You would not see things the same way again.

The_Rock_Meets_The_Moon_Richie_Kehl — Magritte, from Richey’s collected inspirations

I have often wondered how a dedicated collage artist copes with The Stuff. Is there a system? How do you arrange your workspace so you don’t go completely out of your mind? Do you have a method to the madness? If you are Richard Kehl you buy a house, and turn the entire structure into a living breathing library of books, objects, ephemera and eternal work in progress. Each object and image is honored and tended, with the understanding that it is on a path to relationship with other objects and images that will make sublime sense.

The_Bathroom_Gods — The art of arrangement extends to everything, including the bathroom.

You honor books with as much love and attention to indexing as the Library of Congress, with entire rooms of the basement dedicated to outsider art, Japonisme and photography. “I got rid of all my books once. And then I had to buy them all back.”

And who needs dishes? You keep your poetry in the kitchen, for whenever hunger strikes.

This encourages your friends to respond in kind. With me on the studio visit were Joe Max Emminger, Lana Sundberg and Julie Paschkis, seen here wearing a poet’s coat.

In answer to the question of all those little bits of paper: you have a bank. Stacks of foam core board hold hundreds of images, collage in waiting.

“I have nothing to do with it. I wait for them to tell me where they belong and what to do next.”

Two of Kehl’s enduring themes, The Masculine and The Feminine, seen above in diorama.

An early collaboration in a framed sketchbook page, a drawing by Norman Laliberte on the left, and Kehl on the right.

In the late ’60’s and early ’70’s a whole language of collage was developed by people like Richey Kehl, working in concert with poets, visual artists and kindred spirits. This was the beginning of mail art, magical talismans hand-cancelled and sent back and forth to be elaborated upon and transformed and challenging the idea of what is “mine.”

TheYoungAbstractExpressionist — From an earlier life in New York, Kehl as an abstract expressionist.

Below, some of the Kehl’s newest work. I look at these and feel like I am seeing a combination of chess master and Merlin at work, at the height of his alchemical powers. All collages copyright Richard Kehl, used by permission of the artist.

I am ending with this last drawing which comes from a much earlier era. A pure drawing that holds all the elements that I love in Kehl’s work. Thank you Richey, for your brilliance and inspiration.

Studio Visit with Fred Lisaius at Inscape

May 1, 2011 by Iskra Leave a Comment

I visited Fred Lisaius at his studio in the Inscape Building on a bitterly cold day in early spring. As I drove into the parking lot off of Airport Way hail clattered on my windshield and dark clouds billowed to the west. I stood and looked up at the building and felt a chill not just of temperature but of the building’s history as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a holding tank for immigrants, an outscape at the edge of America’s by-invitation-only hearth. Even as it transforms into a new magnet for the arts, with studios for eventually up to 100 artists, the building retains a sense of its former purpose. It exudes a seriousness and a darkness and graphic remnants of its history remain, like the graffiti written in tar by inmates gathered on the roof under hot summer sun.

I had always admired Lisaius’ tapestry-like paintings of flowers and birds set against old-world skies. He is a master of detail and surface and his color harmonies give the viewer a sense of peace and elation. But what provoked me to call him up was his new series of sculptural works a the SAM Rental/Sales Gallery. These mysterious cast resin pieces are a modern re-creation of amber. In travels to Lithuania Lisaius discovered entire towns devoted to this ancient precious stone.

He became fascinated with it, and especially by the inclusions: insects, plant forms, wood and other fragments of life frozen in pine resin from 50 million years ago. As he traveled through Europe he collected found objects and scraps of printed material that captured his attention, stashed them in his pockets, and brought them home. Now they emerge in collaged assemblage, frozen in resin, insects of his own creation.

In the amber world there is much discussion of what is fake. How do you know if it is bakelite? Or worse yet, imitation bakelite? Have you immersed it in water, and does it sink or float? Is it unnaturally clear? How do you know if it was in fact the result of the romance between the mortal fisherman Kastytis and the sea goddess Jurate whose undersea amber castle was destroyed by the Thunder God–? Are the beads in the market fragments from this castle, washed up on the shore? Or merely factory simulations?

Insect1_FredLisaius — “Amber Firefly” © Fred Lisaius 2011

Lisaius’ pieces are great fakes, because they make you stop and consider what is real. We live in a time when impending global extinction makes everything more precious, and simultaneously worthless: how can we afford to mourn each leaf, each butterfly, each minnow, or even every human life lost in today’s 40+ wars? “Real” amber entraps the fly-wing and the spider of prehistoric eras for eternal retrospection. Lisaius’ entraps one person’s memories of time and place in poured resin. If humans are still here to put things in museums thousands of years from now the chance ephemera of this day may seem as rare as the ancient Baltic termites in Palanga‘s amber museum.

Amber_Mosquite-FredLisaius — “Amber Mosquito”(Close-up) © Fred Lisaius 2011

"Amber Insect 4" © Fred Lisaius 2011 — “Amber Insect 4” © Fred Lisaius 2011

At a certain point in our conversation the rain and wind briefly lulled, the sky threatened sun, and I looked up from my cup of instant coffee to throw out the word “souvenir.” “Non, non” Fred protested, “not that at all.” But I love this word. From the original French it means “remembrance or memory.” We tend to translate souvenir into “cheap trinket:” something sold to us by a multinational corporation made in a country continents away from the one in which we are standing to make us remember somebody else’s idea of what we have experienced. Here is your trophy of the Eiffel tower. Here is your velvet-flocked buffalo from the badlands of Dakota. At least it’s small, cheap, and ownable, unlike the actual thing. In an era of upheaval and extinctions the souvenir of memory itself becomes perhaps more precious than anything else. Here we suspend our experience in time as our possession, to share with others as stories, to build our pictures from.

Float_Fred_Lisaius — “Float” © Fred Lisaius 2011

As our time came to an end I asked Fred how his sculptural work has influenced his painting. He said that the suspended insect inclusions in his amber pieces had led him to consider “suspending” an object in a painting. So I leave you with this haunting last image, the immigrant duck floating towards what she knows not.

The Manganese Day

December 29, 2010 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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″

New Directions in Contemplative Art: Conversations with Artists

Studio Visit with Richard Kehl, Poet and Scout

Studio Visit with Fred Lisaius at Inscape

The Manganese Day

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