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Spotlight North Open Studios 2024 Available Work

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Magnolia Blossom, mixed media on panel 6 x 6″ ©Iskra Johnson

Spotlight North Open Studios 2024

I have been busy this month getting ready for Spotlight North Open Studios, showcasing the work and studios of artists in Shoreline, Lake City and North Seattle. This is our third year, and it has been exciting to see attendance grow. The 2024 map is now up on the Spotlight website for planning your visit. This year’s tour has nine locations and ten artists, each with a very different way of working. Each week recent work and an artist profile is featured on our Instagram.

A gallery show is usually a consistent theme and subject matter. An open studio on the other hand allows an artist to show old work and new, and to share the process of how change evolves. In 2022 I focused mostly on prints and my botanical cards. Cards and prints will be available this year but I will also be showing drawings, paintings and mixed media pieces, many of them framed. Most of the work is small and very affordable, ranging from $175-$600 depending on size, medium and frame style. This newsletter shows a portion of the work available, and if you are interested in a piece and would like to inquire about price and put it on reserve please send me a note. Pieces that have pre-sold are not listed.

Mixed Media Studio Process: Juxtapositions

The spring has been a creative time of working in many media. I have always been interested in juxtapositions and technical media experiments of phenomena. Some of these explorations have become what I am calling “Quartets” of individual panels that form a single painting. My career in advertising and publishing was an omnivore’s life, always embracing new languages and means of expression. I love screaming orange, neon green and tasteful neutrals. Futura Bold and Spencerian script. Purely from a process point of view it is a great gift to take the time to look at the influences, absorb the languages of style and give each voice its time on stage. 

As I’ve gone through my archives I’ve found pieces to revisit with a fresh eye and sometimes hair-raising refinements (what was that color I mixed five years ago? Can I keep on drawing over a final varnish?). Some of these pieces are on paper and will be traditionally framed, but others are mounted on panel and floated. I have always reveled in the freedom of working on paper, but glass can create a sense of distance between the viewer and the art. It has been satisfying to embrace the craft of framing and find just the right alternate forms of presentation. 

Equilibrium, calligraphic abstract on paper, mounted to panel. 8 x 8" in 10" frame
Equilibrium, calligraphic abstract on paper, mounted to panel. 8 x 8″ in 10″ frame

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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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Recent Monoprints and an Upcoming Show

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Color Theory Painting Studies Iskra
Color Studies, Studio Work

As we emerge from the pandemic into summer I have good news to report: Seattle Art Museum and SAM Gallery are close to fully reopening! I will be part of a group show in late summer with two other printmakers, Tallmadge Doyle and Jueun Shin. In conjunction with SAM’s Monet exhibit the theme will be water, which I am guessing you may welcome after what could be some very hot months ahead. As post-pandemic plans finalize it is best before visiting to call the gallery and shop (206.654.3120) to learn the latest updates on procedures. At this point access is available Wednesday-Sunday 10-5 without a museum ticket, although the museum website does not yet reflect this.

Water is also the theme of a piece selected for the exhibit Art in the Time of Corona, which features my piece “Ledger” on Artsy.  The goal of this innovative project is to record and exhibit defining artwork created during civil uncertainty. The hope is to unite viewers and help them find the sanctity, comfort and inspiration needed to heal a world in turmoil.

Over the past six months I have been sorting ideas and directions and keeping my studio practice focused on process. Printmaking has been a throughline of all my work for decades, and as part of my year of media exploration I decided to take one more look at “old fashioned” printing with a press, using water-based Akua inks. With help from an associate in Seattle Print Arts I set up my Baby Richeson press, which has been sitting neglected in a dark corner for nearly 20 years. It was mesmerizing to combine the folded paper collage I started doing earlier this year with the press, and I often found myself printing until 1 or 2 in the morning, experimenting with drypoint, monoprint and various forms of chine collé. Very few of these pieces will ever see a public wall, but the interplay between developing ideas in drawing and watercolor and then moving to a the press will be useful for years to come.

Wave Patterns Monoprint by Iskra
Wave Patterns: a monoprint created with Golden Paints open acrylic. Open acrylic is completely amazing. As I struggled with the Akua inks and their honey-based chemistry, which seems to not-dry, like – ever?, I turned to paint instead. I love the fluidity of this modern medium, and its sensitive mark-making possibilities.

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The Pandemic Pause Drawings, A Benefit Sale for Fair Fight

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Origami crane pencil drawing by Iskra
Origami Peace, ©Iskra Johnson, graphite pencil drawing on paper, $350 (SOLD)
Pandemic Pause | New Directions

Since the pandemic lockdown began two months ago I have been working on a series of drawings. The original impetus came from my ongoing project, #100DaysOfTheSpaceBetween, introduced last month. Although the project also involves photography and other media, I decided to use drawing as the foundational practice. In this strange time, cut off from family, friends or social contact, I have sometimes floundered. The isolation of confinement has thrown me into emotional states surreal in their intensity, and the quiet absorption and focus of drawing has become a calm oasis in my days.

As the solitudes of the pandemic have segued with shocking speed into the pandemonium of a June aflame with flash grenades and tear gas I have questioned, as many artists have, the relevance of their art in this time. Social media demands a simple story, an allegiance to one side, and the embrace of slogans with no nuance. I reel in horror at the videos of George Floyd’s murder and wonder if I should drape a black tarp over my Instagram account? For how long? Do I stand with the rioters? The protesters? The police? Or is it possible to stand in a place where I can see from all points of view? Who gets to decide?

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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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