Collage Archives - Iskra Fine Art

Iskra Fine Art Spring Shows 2024: Save the Date!

March 14, 2024 by Iskra Leave a Comment

The Sweeper, from Like Mother, curated by Kelly Lyles

The big sleep of winter seems to have abruptly ended this week, with 70 degrees predicted Sunday! Along with the bloom of forsythia and plum there are 3 spring exhibits ahead.

Like Mother No. 11 at Kirkland Art Center

I hope to see you at the opening of the newest (11th!) iteration of Like Mother at Kirkland Art Center Friday March 22nd, from 6-9. Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Thursday 11-4, Saturday 11-2. Address: 620 Market Street, Kirkland WA 98033.

This version of the exhibit includes several new artists. As interesting as the art are the stories accompanying the work. For me the process of making the three collages in the show was a remedy for grief and a joyful exploration. Being the daughter of a controversial public figure is not always easy. I knew a very different, private version of my mother, and these three collages reflect that view. After my mother’s death in 2019 I began going through her archives. She saved every letter and every document of rites of passage, and these are the artifacts I used to honor her memory.“The Sweeper” (above) depicts Ginny at 3, the youngest and last child in a family of 5, left to entertain herself in a big house mostly emptied of children. The light is the constant sun of California, in the formal rooms of the family home in Redwood City, where her father was mayor.

Governing Verbs (The Nun) [Read more…]

Elusionary Landscapes: New Drawings and Collages from the Rural Heartlands

September 29, 2022 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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, 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 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.

[Read more…]

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…]

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

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…]

Save the Date! Holiday Sale at Studio C December 4th 2021, Plus New Collage Works

October 26, 2021 by Iskra Leave a Comment

“The Mariner’s Dream,” is a new addition to the ongoing project of The Floating World. If you are lost at sea, (or maybe watching The Titanic in your starry night print pajamas at 2 AM) you might wonder just how large the moon should be as it rises, and where exactly in the sky it will appear. Is it true that nothing should ever be in the middle of the sky? And what if a cloud enters the lower right corner: does that make it ok? If you are also lost in a world where things are (still not) normal, and wondering if the hands on the clock will ever return to count the minutes, this image may speak to you. I found the moon about 23 years ago in a flea market in Lisbon. I carried it and a dozen other timeless planets to the border of Spain and back, and then home where they landed in one of the tableaus of mystery objects I keep around the house, waiting for their moment to tell me something new. This Sunday time’s planet floated into the sky and resurrected an image from another era that apparently I was not quite finished with.

It is true, I have actually been watching the Titanic, in my celestial themed pajamas. I have been avoiding the part where it all goes down – Leonardo and Kate never looked so good, and I want them to stay that way forever. Meanwhile, the world insists otherwise. In the supply chain catastrophe of our New Normal 50 cargo containers are right now afloat off the shore of Vancouver island, and the ship itself is on fire. I pray that the mariners are safe, and that nobody’s home remodeling project, (bathtubs? refrigerators?) or landscape painting book that they spent years writing are in those containers. Who knew that “supply chain” would be everything? It’s all got me thinking about time and distance and faith. The bigness and the smallness. And interdependence.

I never got to blogging about the opening at SAM for Rising Tides. Thank you so much for every one who came to the opening and for the support of our work. Above, Tallmadge Doyle, me, and Jueun Shin without our masks for a split second. I am grateful to team Pamela and Lindsey at the gallery and the other artists for making this first SAM Gallery show of the season a success. I was especially happy that Barge (Salmon Bay) an image from a previous body of work, found a home, with a collector who described my work as “elegant, industrial, and psychedelic.” Faith and time: I had exactly one psychedelic experience, on a hilltop in Virginia when I was 16, and I’m still running with it. Artists are often told that “currency is everything” – yet my experience has been the exact opposite. Art and life are a long game, and this month work that is anywhere from 15 years to a month old has made its way to someone’s walls. Faith. Ideas appear for a reason which may never explain itself, but we have to trust and build on what the tides bring in. What we judge as detritus can become gold, or at least a shiny fishing lure, over times’ passage.

[Read more…]

Like Mother No. 11 at Kirkland Art Center

Let’s Connect