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You are here: Home / Archives for Drawing

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
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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Filed Under: Botanical Art Cards, Collage, Drawing, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals Tagged With: Elusionary Landscape, Iskra Landscape drawing, Landscape collage, landscape collage cards, terroir, Tieton Residency, yakima food scene

Recent Monoprints and an Upcoming Show

June 25, 2021 by Iskra Leave a Comment

 

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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Filed Under: Digital Collage, Drawing, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Painting Tagged With: American Flag in art, Duwamish landscape, harbor island, industrial art, Iskra printmaking, Iskra shows, monoprints, SAM Gallery reopens, the golden hour

The Pandemic Pause Drawings, A Benefit Sale for Fair Fight

June 3, 2020 by Iskra 2 Comments

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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Filed Under: Drawing, The 100 Day Projects Tagged With: #100DaysOfTheSpaceBetween, art and politics, Fair Fight, iskra drawings, Isolation diaries, Pandemic art, Silverpoint drawing, Stacey Abrams

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

March 30, 2020 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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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Filed Under: Botanical Art, Collage, Drawing, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals, The 100 Day Projects Tagged With: #Artinisolation, #covidcollaboration, #social distancing, #the100DayProject, Iskra shows, Museo Gallery 2020, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Snow Day Gleanings from the Studio

February 10, 2019 by Iskra 2 Comments

In the Studio Iskra

 

As the snow falls it is putting me in a thinking space. Much as I make fun of Marie Kondo it may not be such a bad idea in the erasing whiteness and silence of winter to sort the collected stacks and stacks of paper, to hold each image and ask in one’s own way, do you bring me joy or anxiety or curiosity and would I miss you if you were gone?

I work on paper. Lots of paper. As a calligrapher I may make one mark hundreds of times, each one on a different piece of paper. In the drifts, in the light from the eastern window, the pages seem simply to melt into the snow. Some fragments have a secret worth asking about. They go in new stacks.

 

 Time And Numbers Iskra

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Filed Under: Drawing, Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals, Photography Tagged With: gleanings, Ink painting, iskra studio, Marie Kondo, seattle snowpocalypse, thinking space

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Morning pages. Reading Wallace Stevens’ ‘13 wa Morning pages. Reading Wallace Stevens’ ‘13 ways of looking at a blackbird’ for the thousandth time and finding it completely new.
Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the sol Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the solitude of taking in a place with every one of our senses, unmitigated by the relational bypass legislated by the need to tend to whether the Other is: okay/happy/comfortable/entertained etc…? Tonight I’m sharing notes on my (new) dedicated weekly visit to the travel state of mind, in which I go somewhere in public as though I was a tourist and read and write and armchair travel. 

I love company, don’t get me wrong. I have traveled with, and without. Evenings are not always at ease. In 1990 I went to a Typography Conference in Oxford. Dropped my luggage a week ahead and took a train to the Lakes. Me and every honeymooning couple of the year, in 19th century bed and breakfasts (all booked by pre-internet postal and phone call.) Horsehair mattresses, pineapple-carved bedposts. Two other non-honeymooning people were allowed into the 40-mile square Lakes that month. They did not make eye contact. 

So it was me and Beatrix Potter, and the “jacket potato”, an unfortunate menu staple that involved baked beans + baked potatoes (in far too close proximity) alone with our observations writing letters home to whichever boyfriend it was left behind. (Here I gracefully omit the grand ball under the tent on the Thames back at the conference and everything that happened after. . .) The Thames is why the British invented elipses. 

I had told myself on some errant Tuesday that England was the size of Whidbey Island. It was a rare lapse, in which I completely forgot: world history? Oh, wait, the Beatles. + King Arthur. Stones and tables and swords. Forgive me while I go re-watch the intro to #Outlander….

Daunting to study the guidebook and realize I should have started this project when I was 11. I have been to England three times. I cannot fathom how I thought I could go again and not want to see everything: every cathedral, flea market, moody moor, outsider mural and Arabic bakery, cinematically filtered through a modern mashup of Virginia Woolf and Peaky Blinders.
Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I fi Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I find myself sometimes seeking very simple places to land. What better place to land then water? In the series of architectural works in progress one of my subjects is the Chittenden Locks. You can’t have the locks without the water that lives to be raised and lowered. These subtle tethers between invisible guide posts and unseen actors offstage speak to me not just of infrastructure and industry, but of our connections to one another. 

I live in a city that has decided resolutely that Zoom is the same as actual conversation. The model embraced here is “if it looks good, as a facsimile, it’s probably good enough.” What a loss for all of those who have spent a lifetime in a craft perfecting real things. Serif, proportion, texture, text— all made visible through touch. One tug of a rope, one breath of wind, and this whole image redesigns itself. With photographic art I can make images without ever smearing paint or lifting out. I touch with my eyes and mind. What makes it human is metaphor. What keeps you tethered to this world, and to others?
Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and archi Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and architecture. This piece harkens to another time. Old world rotogravure, lithography, the specimen studies of explorers first seeing the tropics, or the to-them “new world.” Also to the early psychedelic history of Seattle, where if your UW professor was missing in class he might be sitting in one of the mythic cedars at Volunteer Park, or cactus gazing in the steamy other-world of the conservatory. It was a magical time, and the park was the incandescent center. 

The way I work is by deconstructing the real into many subtle layers of color and tint and tone, and then recomposing as though each piece of photographic information was a plate. In my architectural images and botanical work a piece like this can go back-and-forth for a long time between realism and atmosphere and I never know until the very last step exactly where it will land.
Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by candlelight.
Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions: 

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?

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