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Elusionary Landscapes: New Drawings and Collages from the Rural Heartlands

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Symmetries Interrupted a barn collage landscape
Symmetries Interrupted, limited edition archival print from original photography and painting ©Iskra Johnson Available here

An entire season has passed since I last posted here. It has been a long sun-filled summer filled with concentrated studio time and a pivotal week spent in Eastern Washington in the long awaited Tieton Residency. A dear friend moved to Tieton in Eastern Washington two years ago, with the intention of creating a residency in her farmhouse for visiting artists and writers. The pandemic intervened and the residency did not happen for two years – until this August! I had the farmhouse, the upstairs studio, and the landscape to myself during the day, with hours to wander, photograph and draw. It was an unforgettable time of slow communion with my pencil and camera, with evenings spent in good company getting to know the Yakima Valley in new ways with my hosts. 

Drawing in situ, a skill I had forgotten, and a way of being that feels like home.
Yakima Valley Cuisine Scene
Yakima Valley Cuisine Scene, local, fresh, innovative. Top row, two very different approaches to the idea of soup; below, the wildly wonderful counter at Crafted, with chef-owner Dan Kokomo keeping his charm and his cool on a busy Saturday night.

The White Barn, landscape photography by Iskra

The farmhouse is situated on a road with a front row seat to sunrises and sunsets over the orchard valley. The muse of the property is The White Barn, which I have taken roughly a hundred photographs of (and which is available as part of an ongoing portfolio of Western Photography.) The architecture on the immediate property was my primary focus during the residency, with road trips to document alternate forms of my favorite structure, The Shed, in its native habitat. During this time I used drawing to sharpen my concentration, and apps like SnapSeed to experiment with new ways of combining digital and drawn imagery, which became final works in the studio once I got home.

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The Hellebore Suite: New Botanical Prints and Cards from Iskra

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New, from the Gardener’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena, The Hellebore Suite, available as prints and blank greeting cards.

The Meadow, archival pigment print landscape by Iskra

The hellebore is a complicated flower. Appearing in late winter, it rises up from drifts of snow and bracken, with leaves that unfold like carved marble. The blossoms hang from delicate arched stems, often hidden in shadow. When the hellebore looks up at you, you see a face both innocent and knowing, and you understand why this flower has been a key player in the world of potion and myth. This is a flower you should admire — but never eat. I have many varieties of these in my garden scattered among the ferns and hostas. They also grow wild in the woods nearby, where I captured the pale lavender specimen above, in a print called The Meadow. 

I did the first portrait of a hellebore as part of a series called “Sweet Old World” that came about as I sorted family papers and photos going back to the 1800’s. The style of this work is inspired by vintage tintype. I love the ragged borders and soft organic focus of photography in the early days of its invention. These pieces are a modern interpretation of tintype’s vintage haze and inexactitude, using watercolor, photography and digital printmaking. Click on any image to be taken to my shop.

Hellebore in Victorian Style botanical greeting card
Hellebore in Victorian Style ©Iskra Fine Art 2022
Spring Hellebore cards by Iskra 1200
Spring Hellebore Cards

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Botanical Stationary and Prints from The Gardener’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena

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Wheelbarrow in garden photo by Iskra
Winter Muse

Since the last entry from my garden The Gardener’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena has published a series of botanical stationary and prints. The response has been wonderful, and I am grateful for the support of friends and new patrons from around the country. I am beginning to hear from people who share how they have used the cards, sending them as thank-you’s, condolence, letters and in sets as gifts. There are now ten in the series, with more to come each month. Here are a few glimpses of what’s in the shop.

Anemone in the Field Botanical Card by Iskra
Anemone in the Field
Victorian Anemone

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Eat Dessert First….What Would Eve Say? The Winter Show at Museo

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Elves in a sugar coma

When Museo Gallery announced “Eat Dessert First” as the theme for January’s show I was not enthused. You may be one of the millions of the happily deaccessioned who, exiled from the office, went home to become the master sourdough bakers you’ve always wanted to be. I however haven’t cooked dinner since March 2020. Since then I have been living on Purell cocktails and roasted cashews. How would I be able to tell which comes “first” when I still have not been able to distinguish the days of the week much less my “meal times”—? For two years it’s been a desert of silent meals spent doom-scrolling with a napkin, a votive candle and my phone, and waiting for the world to stop turning in the wrong direction. Appetite. Hmmm.

Nonetheless, I spent a lifetime as a designer taking assignments I didn’t want to do. My training is to catch whatever stick is tossed out and carry it back to whoever threw it. And so I thought about my resistance to this title and worried it, word by word, into the snow-frozen ground. For my personal holiday hashtag I took #sugarcoma, and looked for every situation in which it might apply. Against all odds, which included an alert from the state that I had been exposed to Covid and an emergency test on the morning of Christmas Eve, I had, astonishingly, a picture-perfect and rhapsodic Christmas surrounded by family, throughout which I ate spritz cookies and chocolate for breakfast. For three days I walked in a happy trance from the Betty Crocker cookbook to the cookie tins with their waxed paper petticoats peeking out. When you are an adult home for Christmas after two years of absence nobody says you can’t eat dessert first, or for that matter all day. There is no more perfect state than sitting in a rocker with a blanket and a book after three salted caramels watching snow fall just on the other side of the Christmas tree.

Mulling over the pleasures of indulgence, the ever-lurking punishments of guilt, and the lucrative self-help industries that promise to lead us not into damnation but into boundless self-love, the riddle of the title became clear. It’s the parable of all time. Eden, Eve, and the Apple: The First Dessert. [Read more…]

Iskra Fine Art #100DayProject and the Garden Show at Museo

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The Space Between Train Collage

(See the Motion version on Instagram.)

It has been only 20 days since I last wrote here, and yet in that time the world is completely changed. Millions of people across the globe are now confined to their homes as modern life as we have known it shuts down in the face of the corona virus. The profound sense of isolation in the studio, combined with the media’s constant drumbeat of dystopia pushed me for several weeks close to despair. Forced to look at the books on my shelves (and consider reading them) I came across Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In it, the draft of a calligraphic treatment of a quote: A single metaphor can give birth to love.

With galleries closed and shows delayed or cancelled, and with a sense of life or death urgency and helplessness heavy in the air, motivation for working in the studio has been in question. But the quote, and its tissue paper flourishes, lingered in my mind. I think it was its echo that led me to realize that this is the time, after years of thinking about it, to take on #The100DayProject. Under house arrest in my pajamas, there is no escape. And certainly nothing to lose.

The One Hundred Day Project was first introduced in 2007 by designer Michael Bierut as a challenge to his graduate students at Yale. The outlines were simple: “Do a design operation that you are capable of repeating every day. Do it every day for one hundred days.” The project was brought onto social media by Elle Luna in 2014 and has become a platform for reinvention with global reach through Instagram.

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