Botanical Art Archives - Page 3 of 4

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

March 1, 2022 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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

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

January 10, 2022 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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

March 30, 2020 by Iskra Leave a Comment

(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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Winter Walk | New Year’s Greetings from Iskra

January 1, 2020 by Iskra 2 Comments

Winter Walk Print by Iskra — “Winter Walk,” limited edition print © Iskra Johnson

Greetings in the new year! As I write this the rain has lifted in spite of the emoticon insisting otherwise on my phone. Outside the studio window the trees are shimmering, in delicate shades of umber and sap. I will be going for my New Year’s walk soon, but I want first to send out this letter of thanks to friends and collectors for your support of my work over this past year. Although my attention was often elsewhere, preoccupied with family and personal loss, this turned out to be the best year I have ever had in art. I have never felt more grateful for the opportunities of this path, and am filling notebooks with new ideas that keep me up until the wee hours.

The new year brings some shifts in focus and refinements of direction. Although I will continue to do prints, in multiple ongoing themes ranging from natural landscapes to architecture and industry, I am also returning to drawing and the roots of contemplative art. For much of my life calligraphy was my daily practice and also my livelihood. The practice of 26 simple forms kept me clear and laser focused: it is not possible to do calligraphy without being in the moment. Photography is also an art of the moment, and of awareness, but with the introduction of digital methods and the printmaking processes it is also mind-bendingly technical. One can very quickly forget to breathe, and accordingly shut off the pathways to seeing that come only through working directly with one’s hands.

Last month I officially retired from my career in design to focus full time on art. Letters will continue to appear, but in new forms, not as corporate identities or book titles, but as visual art and as essays. Honoring the path I took in lettering and all that it taught me, I have returned to the morning practices of handwriting and drawing as meditation, which opens up a whole new-old world of contour, shape, representation, chiaroscuro. I am sharing my process on Instagram and find the community there to be wonderfully supportive (including in bringing me new tools, like the marvelous 3-point ball point pen from renowned artist Nicolas Sanchez.) Instagram is my laboratory for bringing worlds together: narrative, poetry, photography, community and contemplation. From the act of making process visible my work takes leaps it would not think of in the privacy of my own studio.

Concentration drawing of a moon shell by Iskra

So it turns out ballpoint pen was just a starter drug to pencil. I have never been able to draw happily with a pencil and suddenly here it is and I love it, thank you hb graphite and mornings listening to jazz to keep the thinking mind quiet. To draw is to find the horizon. A shell is a vast landscape with one curved edge and beyond it is the sea and the sun and the moon. To draw a moon shell is to sneak up on it. I always love best the white space and for me I go on tiptoes with very soft feet before committing to the form.

If you are used to seeing architecture here and wondering about consistency, don’t for one minute be fooled…. A shell is a house by any other name.

My limited edition prints can be seen in a beautiful ongoing display now at Museo Gallery on Whidbey Island, and in a new venture out of Paris that I will share more about as it develops. I am offering a range of new prints in my shop available to browse online or in studio visits. The two forest images here are from a series based on winter walks. I love taking digital methods and transforming them through a classic aesthetic. I approach the making of a digital photographic print as I used to approach darkroom printing, dodging and burning, proofing, squinting, and always keeping in the foreground a sense of printerlyness and paper. The forest series is a vestige of an older world, when there were Currier and Ives plates lined up on the mantel, and the forest was eternal. This series, like the Traveler’s Suite, is intimate scale, 12 x 16 on a 17 x 22 sheet.

I wish you a beautiful beginning to the new decade. May the weather emoticon work with us more often than not, and bring at least as much light as dark. And may we all look up and see the sky.

Forest Grove Fine Art Print by iskra — “Forest Grove” limited edition archival pigment print © Iskra Johnson

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Vashon Island Visual Artist Studio Tour Preview

April 29, 2018 by Iskra 1 Comment

Two Tulip Prints by Iskra — Two Tulips, prints based on Venetian plaster pieces, available here.

Just a few days until the Vashon Island Visual Artist’s Studio Tour! I will be showing work in the lovely satellite studio of Vashon artist Cathy Sarkowsky, and will be there for the entire show which goes from Saturday and Sunday 10 AM – 5 PM May 5-6 and 12-13. Check out the studio map here. This studio tour is a chance to explore new directions and show work that hasn’t been seen before. Although I will have industrial work on hand, most of the prints and mixed media pieces will be nature inspired, and come from the contemplative side of life, based on my garden.

When I bought my house 16 years ago I was self-identified as a Capitol Hill Person. Like my neighbors, I insisted the city ended at the Montlake Bridge, and my idea of a garden was a window box with a struggling coleus and some pansies. So when the realtor told me the house came with a 7,000 square foot lot I almost fainted. The first glimpse was daunting: chain link, a 60-foot RV pad, and a patchy lawn covered with broken bits of landcsape lighting chewed by a dog. Plus, the leaking pond with a pug-faced gargoyle with a broken wing. The owners handed me a tube of black sealant, fish pellets, a pair of size 4 hip waders and waved goodbye. I vowed to stay inside and do important things, like read and make art in the funky but promising studio.

And then the Heron arrived.

Visitation The Heron print by Iskra — The Heron | Visitation, limited edition print available here.

It was early on a November morning, in that watery oyster light the Pacific Northwest does so well. The heron stood perfectly still outside the picture window. I didn’t realize until he had flown away that he had taken all the goldfish with him. In flight his wings seemed to cover half the pond, and I felt like I had been visited by royalty. From there it was a rapid ride towards the obsessive life of the newborn Earth Goddess. I went out and bought as many plants as possible that looked good next to each other but required different amounts of water and light and which promptly keeled over from enthusiastic miss-treatment. I told anyone who would volunteer to advise me that I had taken a stand against flowers and that the only thing that mattered was winter, fall, and how different greens and textures played against each other. In other words I was completely deluded, and missing the whole point. I eventually grew into the fact of the changing seasons, and the matter of fact magic of death and rebirth and its necessary angel: color. (Read about that here.)

Over the years I grew flowers and stole flowers and found them by the side of the road and fell madly in love with each one and yes got my heart broken by the sound of their petals falling. Here are two miniature works about just that, the sound of orchid leaves and what gets left behind. Autumn leaves in color are heart stopping, but equally lovely is the roadkill of leaves run over by cars.

Botanical orchid miniature on venetian plaster

I like to use these small pieces as points of focus with other objects. They can live framed or unframed:

Venetian Plaster Stil Life

Here are a few more of the mixed media plaster pieces that will be available on Vashon. I am posting more each week in the Venetian plaster portfolio.

Snowdrop flower on Venetian plaster by Iskra — Snowdrop | mixed media on Venetian plaster | 12×12 inches | $600

Autumn Rose Venetian plaster by Iskra — Autumn Rose | mixed media on Venetian plaster | 12×12 inches | $600

Red poppies on Venetian plaster by Iskra — At the Pond | mixed media on Venetian plaster | 12×12 inches | $600

As any gardener knows, impermanence is the name of the game. Change or die. Or, change and die. What better icon of that than the dragonfly, symbol of transformation? I have revisited the subject of impermanence through this print numerous times over the years, each time seeing some new way to shift detail or value. The latest iteration is subtle, a brighter variation, with a larger edition and smaller size to make it more affordable (click anywhere on these three images to see it in my shop.): Dragonfly print by Iskra Lastly, here is a piece I have never shown, based on my walks around Greenlake and the favorite inlet where the willows drape over the water and the ducks find their bliss.

Water Kimono Print by Iskra — Water Kimono, archival pigment print, a new addition to The Floating World series.

Give me a shout if you cannot get to Vashon Island or would like to see any of this work in advance. And keep up to date on the latest additions to the studio sale on Facebook and Instagram. I look forward to seeing new and old friends next weekend!

dragonfly by Iskra

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