Essays Archives - Iskra Fine Art

Open Studio Tours: Creating Sustainable Ecosystems for the Arts

June 25, 2024 by Iskra 2 Comments

Creating a Sustainable Arts Ecosystem

The word “sustainability” is everpresent today in discussions of climate change and global warming. Less often do we hear it applied to the visual arts, which are themselves part of an ecosystem. Community support for the visual arts tends to be scattershot and fitful, reliant on the generosity of funding organizations and a handful of collectors (like Seattle’s departed Paul Allen) who, though much appreciated, can change their affections without warning or predictability. With state and local governments facing recurring deficits, arts funding is usually the last to be added and the first to be cut. Large ongoing grants from foundations most often go to established organizations like museums, theaters, schools and community associations; even if an artist competes successfully for the rare individual grant, these only fund a fraction of expenses and rarely provide ongoing support.

The path to success in art is rarely direct. Developing a meaningful body of work as an artist can require years of experimentation, skill building and detours into work that may not succeed financially but which is necessary to creative growth. For this process artists need time, a work space and opportunities to test their work in the marketplace. Artists need regular sales of their work and a growing collector base to thrive.

Today the web is increasingly accepted as the replacement for traditional art sales venues, with claims that social media and online shops make galleries obsolete. Granted, success has come to select superstars, but increasingly social media favors “influencers,” brand ambassadors and advertisers, and not actual artists, (AKA “content creators”). The algorithms of Instagram and Facebook surface primarily the minority who are already famous and successful, while offering less and less visibility to artists who need a reliable showcase where their work can connect to buyers. [Read more…]

The Museum of Light: On the Cusp Between Summer and Fall

September 11, 2023 by Iskra 4 Comments

Painting Change Work in Progresss — *Painting Change, work in progress. Acrylic ink on panel.*

A visit to the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and a walk through change

In most museums sunlight is an unwelcome visitor. Light degrades what it warms. It is known to singe manuscripts until the edges crumble; it fades brocade and upends the narrative as the sword above the stag’s head turns from bloody to gray. Perhaps (though the back of the tapestry tells another story), it was not a hunt scene after all? History embrittles until truth hovers on the cusp.

Conservators learn: all interventions must be reversible. Do no harm, operate like a surgeon; use a fine brush, needle and thread, cotton soaked in brine. The ambered sky of a Dutch Harbor is lifted and revised– yet it may be revised again, when we know even more about the intended color of the afternoon.

Sunlight has no such mandate. Nor do the architects. In their contract skyscrapers need not return to 1930’s rooming house, or the even earlier logger’s cabin, nor must conservators be able to excavate the mastodon in the basement or lay out his bones in order. There is no past, all contracts are broken, there is only now, and it looks tall.

Construction site with tree and shadow Seattle — *Trees in balcony light.*

On Saturday morning I walked through the part of the city I call The Amazon, named for the river of money that flows through it. Streets were empty, stilled, and the only sounds were pennants rattling above construction sites and the thrum of machines that keep the buildings alive and young. The air was luxurious, as it has been all summer, but more particularly now as September days lead into fall. In the 13 years since I started documenting the neighborhood nearly everything old is gone. What is precious is vanishingly rare, and redefined by transience: the angle of light where it can steal through glass and concrete, a balcony still hugging privacy while another story waits to complete itself ten feet away. In a week the balcony will be in shade, eye to eye with a stranger’s living room. [Read more…]

Collage Life, Refiguring Art and Friendship in the Pandemic

August 30, 2020 by Iskra 10 Comments

The Correspondent, ©Iskra Johnson

(This late summer dispatch breaks all the rules of “newsletter.” August is a time of slow thinking and revision, thought and word pasted and lifted and re-placed in an order based on considerate disorder and association, ie. on the structure of my mind. If there is no news (I have been immersed in art history which is by definition old news) there is still, however a “letter.” This post is about letter writing itself, and how personal correspondence can mean the world and re-make the world of our creative lives. Settle into a deep chair, with good light or a rustling tree and a cat at your feet. Consider that the post office would love it if you bought some stamps.)

On this particular morning, about 214 days since the pandemic became the official organizing principle, I am sitting at my kitchen table drinking Earl Grey and looking at a stack of books and magazines and letters accumulated since spring. In April my friend Jennifer began sending me her monthly Poetry subscriptions along with pages torn from magazines. Every page is pre-read and annotated with trenchant scribbles in the margins, curated personally just for me. Jennifer has reached the place in life of casting off. I am still bringing things into my house, desperate for distraction, but seem to have confused doom scrolling and pulp novels with The Great Books. I gather romances from the Little Free Libraries on my walks and have not made it beyond chapter 1.

When the first poetry letter arrived I was ecstatic. Mail! Brown paper and string! And delivered by a man in blue socks and shorts, as though it was 1958, a sandwich meant Mayonnaise on Wonder Bread, and Lassie the Collie still roamed the earth in his white socks, teaching us what heroes look like. The letters have ignited a connection that feels bigger than just the two of us, my friend and me sitting alone dangling face masks on our wrists in our separate homes. Over 20 years we have corresponded by email and post, with a dedication that is Victorian. When we compose a sentence to send to each other it is with the knowledge that we are writing, not just the tourist postcard’s “wish you were here,” but miniature novellas painting scenes or memories that cross space and time. We write to bring each other actually here, and we take great care. [Read more…]

A Night at the Opening of the Seattle Asian Art Museum (Snow Moon)

February 17, 2020 by Iskra Leave a Comment

There is a perfume called Museum, available at discreet boutiques. When you daub it behind your ears pearls attach, shimmering and pendant from tiny diamonds. Your neck grows long and swans into the darkness of evening above a silk dress sewn from the sky of early dusk. Every word spoken, from the mouth delicately suspended above the long white neck, has the quality of pronouncement. What your eyes light upon is anointed, pedigreed, and placed on a pedestal. This girl with the pearl is the ultimate docent. She has ridden alongside the robber barons and hauled the world’s worth home, there to catalog objects that always aspired (without knowing it!) to become artifact. She finds it charming to be confused with the girl in the Vermeer, the girl hanging in the Louvre and adored by millions.

Because of the internet, which appears in the palm of my hand every five minutes, I cannot help but compare myself to that Girl. Behind my ears is simply the after-scent of shampoo from Walgreens. I wear jeans and a puffy jacket, and sterling silver ornaments, buried in unstyled hair. If I was to de-acquisition a chunk of statuary and remove it from its pedestal for my personal collection I would be hauled off to jail and my friends would leave me. Nothing says have and have-not like a museum.

The Seattle Asian Art Museum tries to meet this situation head on, so to speak, while being appropriately oblique. In the Room of the Beheaded Buddhas, each head of the half-dozen is clearly displayed as a trophy. The only thing missing is the bloodied chisel. Says the placard: These fragments of figures also reflect the difficult reality that the historical art market supplied such small, portable and alluring objects to collectors under the circumstances of colonial expansion and other forms of cultural imperialism. Explore our smartphone tour for further discussion. Should you flinch at the phrase “cultural imperialism,” remember that the museum is not running for higher office. It is simply telling it like it is.

[Read more…]

Solstice Meditations on a Year of Chiaroscuro

December 22, 2017 by Iskra 5 Comments

Lake Country Elegy print by Iskra — Lake Country Elegy, mixed media print. Available on SaatchiArt. © Iskra Johnson

“All that is solid melts into air.” – Marshall Berman

“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” – Tim O’Brien

My studio window faces east, and in the winter a plume of silver rises from my neighbor’s chimney, blooming upward against the dark scrim of evergreens until it blends into the clouds above the little lake hidden beyond. Although it is beautiful, I can’t look at an arabesque of smoke these days without thinking of California and the fires. In the morning as I sit to meditate and be grateful for the day my thoughts run beyond the borders of the visible. I shut my eyes and my mind fills with headlines, a tickertape of catastrophe.

2017 brought a harrowing onslaught of natural and unnatural disasters, from tropical storms to earthquakes to fires to the drastic political campaign to dismantle our national parks. Some disasters seem distant; others, depending on the luck of personal geography, may infiltrate every pore of your skin and fill your hair with ash. I live in the still-damp terrarium of the Pacific Northwest, but my family’s roots are in California. All through this late summer and fall I was on high alert with worry, thinking of my cousins. In Seattle and the islands the sunsets were spectacular. The smoke from the northern fires in Canada and to the East filtered into our native silver light and turned it tangerine. Leaf-shaped ash settled on the windowsills.

As the fires in Sonoma spread, an email chain of 19 cousins sprang up to share news of evacuations. In Santa Rosa a cousin’s house and car burned to the ground. In the midst of worry and sorrow we turned instinctively to history for solace and began to share the legacy of family stories. Each telling of the family myths had been remembered differently, and changed when retold. Did grandma McCarthy really fall out of bed when the San Francisco earthquake struck? Do we believe that patrician matriarch with white hair was ever thirteen, and wringing her hands in the garden and reciting poetry to calm herself down – or is that Irish hyperbole? The fires came. The family lived in tents in Golden Gate Park. For how long, a day or a week or months is unclear, but we needed to believe this story, because it meant that there had been worse, a fire and an earthquake, and we come from a resilient line of people who survive catastrophe, and quote poetry while doing it.

The fire stories in the news all recite a version of the same moral tale. The person, chased by flames, throws a few things into a car or backpack as they run for it. They lose everything, but they are grateful for their lives because that’s what’s important. Those of us reading are prodded to nod in agreement: yes, look how their values clarify in the heroic emergency, all that matters is the life force and continuing on. And yet. In the lengthening thread of my Irish cousins’ correspondence about catastrophe, objects began to emerge. Everyone, it seemed, had some heirloom tucked away, and we began to trade pictures. A sterling hairbrush, a mirror. Grandfather’s copybook. A gold watch and chain inscribed with three different initials dating from 1848. Byrne, Rooney, McCarthy: Éire. An entire island comes attached to these names.

Objects matter. They hold memory, or, as Fennel Hudson put it, “fine things are reservoirs for the heart,” whether they are engraved in gold or ghosts of silver halide on stained paper.

Heirloom study, mixed media by Iskra — Heirloom Study One, from the McCarthy trove. Mixed media print, size variable, available in my shop. © Iskra Johnson

As today’s younger generation embraces a vogue for minimalism and non-attachment, consider that it may be born of necessity as much as fashion. The environment is imploding, the seas are rising, the idea of a “job” or “security” or “family” has been replaced by gig, by reinvention, and by never getting married because you never know when change might happen. At the same time as all that is solid melts into air, global culture has embraced images as never before. How many thousands of times a day does someone say “just like a movie,” “postcard perfect,” “Pictures or it didn’t happen….” The line between real and replica has never been less clear. You could call this delusion, or you could call it a fine and logical survival mechanism. It is human to want something to hold onto, and when the actual world is looking shaky the idea, the image, may be that something. If you are standing in the smoking ruins of your home it is the idea of home that will move you onward to rebuild.

All the same, I do not want to live in a world built purely on sentimental remembrance. Take the Arctic Wildlife Refuge (oops, sorry, it’s been taken already) or the Bears Ears National Monument (oh, that too, hieroglyphs and all–). Wilderness is our image bank as a collective consciousness. It’s the idea of the wild and all that it contains. But if wilderness becomes a denuded moonscape of oil rigs the idea itself will die, and with it the collective soul. Then we have only the Disney version sold back to us as a movie, in a sorry attempt at pacification through images and a soundtrack to consume.

My recent work is preoccupied with this tension between the ideal, what I think of as the archetypal food of the soul, and the unironic in-your-face calamity of the present. I am never drawn to overtly political art, but as a politically engaged person it is always present as subtext in the images I make. Politics is power. The distribution of power and its effects on the landscape change what we see and how we see it. As what we took to be solid melts into the sea or goes up in smoke, the importance of images becomes even more vital. Images are our bank for the spirit, our place to store remembered bits of Eden, against getting tired, and forgetting.

For instance, this place. It’s just a green truck, in the hills. But that day the hills were green and the pond was full and the wind blew softly with no trace of heat. It’s a place you might want to return to from time to time.

Potter Valley limited edition print by Iskra — Potter Valley, limited edition print, size variable. © Iskra Johnson

Ahead, I hope you will save the date, March 3rd from 3-6 PM, for the opening of Industrial Pastorale at Perry and Carlson in Mount Vernon. This will be my first solo show in several years, and I am very excited about the new directions of the work. You can see glimpses in progress on my Instagram and Facebook.

If you are interested in purchasing work you may contact me directly for inquiries if something you like is not listed in my shop. Many of my larger prints are now on SaatchiArt, or you may find them at Seattle Art Museum Gallery.

Wishing you a time of peace and renewal in the season of the Solstice.

Iskra