Essays Archives - Iskra Fine Art

Object Lessons: The Valentine

February 13, 2025 by Iskra Leave a Comment

As work in the studio moves in new directions not yet ready to surface, I offer you, in lieu of new paintings, my morning’s meditation on the season.

I hear this month half-melted in dirty snow belongs to a Saint dressed in velvet. Amid the scrolling bonfires of vitriol, romance still flutters “below the fold” as they used to say, back in the day when you could iron the news in half.

Forgive me if I had misplaced February. At Trader Joe’s, on a mission to find King County’s last carton of eggs, I pushed my cart past the bulbs dangling jaundiced roots and the sticks that hold up orchids and arrived at a startling array of succulents in pink ceramic hearts. I paused. Such an unexpected sweetness they offered, tiptoeing into the swirling turmoil of my thoughts. I looked at the scalloped edges of the planters and the cascades of pearls and hens and chicks and said to myself, I am not the kind of person who buys such a thing. [Read more…]

New Years Eve 2025: The Intentions Ritual

January 4, 2025 by Iskra Leave a Comment

New Years Eve I sat with a friend at the kitchen table, in a ceremony to shape the story of the year past and the year to come. Tangerines, mochi and tea, candles to warm the light and help to shape a vaporous not-yet built future from our irresolute selves. She is considering leaving a house and a life of 33 years, I am more fully looking to own the life I have. We could learn much from the mollusks and the hermit crabs; it is hard to leave the shell of a house that no longer fits when a new one has not yet been found. Perhaps we needed candlelit moon shells, with their romantic arabesques, to thoroughly walk us into the space of new places made vacant and filled with possibility.

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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

(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…]