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You are here: Home / Archives for Drawing

Hilo, the Big Island, Just Before the Rain

February 21, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Architectural-Drawing-Hilo-Hawaii
Hilo, © Iskra Johnson, charcoal dust and water, 15" x 19"

If you would like to see this drawing in person it is currently available at Prographica Gallery.

Filed Under: Drawing Tagged With: Atmospheric charcoal drawing of buildings, Charcoal Drawing of Hilo Hawaii

Opening of Black & White Show at Fraker Scott

February 17, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Opening night of The Black & White Show at Fraker Scott with Wanda Pelayo, in February of 2012. Part of the sequence from Drawings in Dust is on the Wall behind.

 Iskra At Black &White Show Opening

Filed Under: Drawing, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past

Drawing in Hard Times: Occupying the News at My Kitchen Table

January 12, 2012 by Iskra

Drawing Flowers at my Kitchen Table

Back in the first January after the Crash of September 18, 2008, I was one of many who found themselves bewildered and petrified by the cascade of economic events beyond their control. I don’t need to go into personal details, (just google “auction rate securities + fraud+ retirement savings”) except to note that it did seem that all pillars of safety were falling, most especially the capitalist system — a system I had relied upon as a professional designer to put food on the table. By January I had spent four months archiving, updating, shaking the known trees, and banging my head on a small flat stone. With the phone-line to the capitalist world apparently dead I sat for many long hours at my kitchen table immobilized and staring into the abyss.

In this state I began to read newspapers with a grim scavenger obsession: what had fallen in the last hour? What was next? Who was suffering the most? And that is when I began to clip out the faces of bankers. Through no fault of their own they were all men. I began to draw them. Mr. Goldman Sachs, Mr. Arrested at 4 AM in his red sweatshirt, Mr. I Am Not Either Guilty. Oh, and one woman, Ms. Software Oligarch, in her perfect mannish Nehru shirt. I moved on to men shouting (mostly coaches) and men playing baseball. All this complicity, all this power and rage, captured in the sweet, soft, smudgy newsprint. At a certain point I couldn’t stand it anymore. I bought some tulips and turned the sketchbook around and started drawing petals and leaves, thinking, what will it be like when faces and flowers meet in the middle? And what is the masculine, and what is the feminine, what is this all about?

It was technically a wonderful exercise in how to use colored pencil, which I had never tried before. It was soothing, slow, patient work, perfectly suited to the intimate space of the kitchen. And emotionally it was revelatory. To shift from one subject to another, from livid anger to botanical grace over the course of the day, brought me a measure of equanimity. It also dealt with one of my favorite subjects in art, the Real and the Unreal. The ardent tulip was unequivocally real, the newspaper, not-so-much. Although I was using exactly the same materials for both there were subtle shifts in perception as the subject changed.

Revisiting the sketchbook in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street Movement I found a few other drawings I had forgotten: the innocents, the lost players, the embarrassingly earnest. It seems the theme of power and powerlessness, of crumbling security and tidal economic changes, of the need for refuge, are not going away anytime soon. For millions the world is far more shaky than it was in that first dreadful year after the crash.

Bank-Criminal-1

Mr.-I'm-Not-Guilty

TulipPencilDrawingWithColor

Tulip Leaves Colored Pencil Drawing

Shouting man sketch by Iskra

Coah shouting drawing by Iskra

Her Speller Number 45, drawing by Iskra THe Fan, colored pencil drawing by Iskra

The-Catcher Pencil Drawing in Moleskine

Of Flowers and Men. Selections from a personal sketchbook, colored pencil and lead pencil on Moleskine. (Click to enlarge.)

Filed Under: Drawing, Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals Tagged With: artist personal Moleskine sketchbook, colored pencil journal, drawing flowers in colored pencil, drawing from the newspaper, iskra moleskine journal, Portrait of a recession, portraits of Occupy Wallstreet

Artists For Japan Seattle Show and Fundraiser at Kobo

March 21, 2011 by Iskra 1 Comment

FallingCircle
Falling Circle, charcoal dust and water, © Iskra Johnson

I will be participating this weekend in an art sale to benefit relief efforts in Japan. Artists For Japan has been organized by a number of Seattle artists with connections to Japan. All artwork, paintings, drawings, calligraphy, sumi-e, ceramics, jewelry, sculpture, prints and more has been donated. No commissions are being paid, and all the hard costs for the event have been donated. All proceeds will go to the Red Cross.

The sale is being held at Kobo at Higo, a remarkable and historic gallery space in Seattle’s International District. You can read about the history of Higo and why it is such an important part of the community here.

The piece I am donating is from Drawings in Dust II, and is created with powdered pigment and water on paper. You can see more in the series in the post below.

Hope to see you this weekend!

Saturday March 26, 12pm – 8pm
Sunday, March 27, 12pm – 5 pm
KOBO at HIGO
604 South Jackson Street
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 381-3000

Filed Under: Drawing Tagged With: Artists for Japan, Iskra drawings in dust, Kobo at Higo, powdered pigment, relief efforts for Japan quake, Seattle artists for Japan

The Beloved Cosmos

April 14, 2010 by Iskra Leave a Comment

cosmos and bee drawing by Iskra
The Beloved Cosmos. Mixed media drawing © Iskra Johnson

The Cosmos is your basic “how to draw a flower-flower” with an upgrade. It has the round dot in the middle and the cheerfully radiating petals, but it has a subversive magic. Left to its own devices in a parking strip the stalks will grow five or six feet tall, their feathery leaves creating a diffuse haze that looks like smoke. The shade of pink transcends all others except perhaps the pink of sunset: it’s the good pink. I made this drawing the other day after studying the first one to bloom in my April garden. It’s good to see a bee show up and follow directions. Something is working in this world.

Filed Under: Drawing, The Garden Tagged With: artist garden, cosmos, drawings of flowers, flower and bee, flower drawing, mixed media drawing

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Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: I added baking soda to my gesso. Pretty wild texture here, not sure yet how stable it is. You can see the test of the edges in the second piece— the rugged edge only works if I get a pristine background and unfortunately the tape I used to mask it did not work consistently. Hello tape, my old friend and nemesis. You work differently on every surface. These little barn structures give me great comfort as the bigger structures of our government and nation seem to be crumbling.
Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the fields somewhere, on the road to Edison. Acrylic on prepared ground, sketchbook.
MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai We MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei at Seattle Art Museum.
I am thinking this morning about the phrase Americ I am thinking this morning about the phrase American Heartland. Learning to paint a barn means studying the neutrals. Our political discourse has pitted the barn people against the city people and there are no neutrals, just shouting. But if you walk out into the horizon lands, all you hear is the wind and a kestrel. Walk in boots, hard-pressed against your toes, walk on stubble barefoot and get acupuncture for a lifetime. Study the intervals: how the clouds can be in the upper one third neatly or one sixth, precarious, the future disappearing with the sun as it falls making the barn your whole world if you’re three years old and looking up; one big triangle with a square in the center, and so many mysteries inside the square. 

There is also the question of what kind of light seeps between the verticals and is the light coming in the evening or at midday when you can finally begin to make out all the other tiny squares within the big square, which would be called hay. Reach for the rope and swing out over the canyon, that great big canyon from bale to bale.

Collage studies: painting neutrals
A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yor A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yorker this morning, about the global population crash. This will upend urbanism, for sure, though it will very good for veterinarians and dog groomers:
“Only two communities appear to be maintaining very high fertility: ultra-Orthodox Jews and some Anabaptist sects. The economist Robin Hanson’s back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that twenty-third-century America will be dominated by three hundred million Amish people. The likeliest version of the Great Replacement will see a countryside dotted everywhere with handsome barns.”
First Thursday. Such a beautiful night. First Thursday. Such a beautiful night.

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