Iskra Fine Art

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Every Night Another, from the Sunset Suite

Landscape Reimagined

Opening Saturday May 6th

From 5-7 PM

Featuring Iskra Johnson, CA Pierce & Danielle Bodine

Museo Gallery, 215 First Street, Langley, WA, 98260

I hope to see you Saturday night for the Langley Artwalk and the opening night of Museo’s May show! I am happy to be in great company, with CA Pierce’s gentle atmospheric landscapes and Danelle Bodine’s mixed media sculptures. 

The gallery will have additional unframed prints from the new Sunset Suite and botanicals that have not been shown outside of my studio. The Sunset Suite is a series of 7 prints, each one unique. As with several of the other landscapes in this exhibit the work is composed from my ink paintings, drawing from imagination and memory. See the collection of my work available from Museo here.

Windswept The Bluff at Ebey's Landing

Windswept, The View From Ebey’s Landing

https://iskrafineart.com/8783-2/

The Wabi Sabi Suite of New Botanical Cards and Upcoming Shows

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Summerlight Botanical Card

 

Everything is in flux in late February, not quite winter, not yet spring. The juncos still sit on top of the echinacea forgetting December’s snows and pecking vainly for seeds. The willows hang above the water’s edge remembering autumn, and the wild plum cannot wait for the warm winds that bring spring’s color and perfumes. A new set of cards from the Gardener’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena is out today and available in my shop. I am calling this set of images The Wabi Sabi Suite, in recognition of the sense of impermanence that colors February’s mood.

The images were originally made as transfer prints using my original paintings or photographs printed onto rag paper with a solvent. The process is unpredictable and brings a granular texture and soft irregular edges to the images. “Wild Plum” is particularly soft and dreamy, as its original source was a 40 yearold film photograph with the distinctive soft focus only film can create. If you are interested in the large size of Summerlight, it is framed in maple and available from my studio. A very limited edition of 3, of which one is left, the image is 16 x 21 on a sheet of 30 x 22 Arches 88.

 

Summerlight in FrameSummerlight, available from my studio

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New Calligraphic Abstractions from Iskra Fine Art

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Industrial Noise Abstract
Industrial Noise, Abstract Calligraphic © Iskra Johnson

For me there is no more valuable way to start the morning in the studio than by reading poet Jane Hirshfield, and her book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. I think it possible that I will still be reading this book, quarter-page by quarter-page, for decades; her words are so resonant and visual they transform my world each time I read them. This morning’s find was a passage on subtlety:

 “ Subtlety’s etymological roots lie in the loom-woven cloth. It is the name we give to thought that is both finely textured and ranging, able to bring disparate and multiple qualities into the unified, usable fabric of a new whole. The uncertain is subtlety’s inscape: what is woven has – and needs – gaps. In subtle response, thought is stitched into place with its own undertows, opposites, and extensions, by a mind that questions and crosshatches its statements and feelings. Language itself is subtle by nature, multi-stranded of meaning – and what is good poetry if not language awake to its own powers?” 

Abstract Landscape Collage by Iskra
(Detail) Abstract Landscape, paper collage © Iskra Johnson

Although my work ranges over many themes, the overarching theme may be the means of expression itself: language. Even when the framework is not visible, my background [Read more…]

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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Eat Dessert First….What Would Eve Say? The Winter Show at Museo

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Elves in a sugar coma

When Museo Gallery announced “Eat Dessert First” as the theme for January’s show I was not enthused. You may be one of the millions of the happily deaccessioned who, exiled from the office, went home to become the master sourdough bakers you’ve always wanted to be. I however haven’t cooked dinner since March 2020. Since then I have been living on Purell cocktails and roasted cashews. How would I be able to tell which comes “first” when I still have not been able to distinguish the days of the week much less my “meal times”—? For two years it’s been a desert of silent meals spent doom-scrolling with a napkin, a votive candle and my phone, and waiting for the world to stop turning in the wrong direction. Appetite. Hmmm.

Nonetheless, I spent a lifetime as a designer taking assignments I didn’t want to do. My training is to catch whatever stick is tossed out and carry it back to whoever threw it. And so I thought about my resistance to this title and worried it, word by word, into the snow-frozen ground. For my personal holiday hashtag I took #sugarcoma, and looked for every situation in which it might apply. Against all odds, which included an alert from the state that I had been exposed to Covid and an emergency test on the morning of Christmas Eve, I had, astonishingly, a picture-perfect and rhapsodic Christmas surrounded by family, throughout which I ate spritz cookies and chocolate for breakfast. For three days I walked in a happy trance from the Betty Crocker cookbook to the cookie tins with their waxed paper petticoats peeking out. When you are an adult home for Christmas after two years of absence nobody says you can’t eat dessert first, or for that matter all day. There is no more perfect state than sitting in a rocker with a blanket and a book after three salted caramels watching snow fall just on the other side of the Christmas tree.

Mulling over the pleasures of indulgence, the ever-lurking punishments of guilt, and the lucrative self-help industries that promise to lead us not into damnation but into boundless self-love, the riddle of the title became clear. It’s the parable of all time. Eden, Eve, and the Apple: The First Dessert. [Read more…]