Music — Iskra Fine Art

Invitation to Museo Gallery’s “Playlist” Show

January 23, 2019 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Listening to Bill Frisell print by Iskra — “The Break, 1/5” © Iskra Johnson 26 x 34 archival pigment print on German Etching.

Museo Gallery on Whidbey Island opens its first exhibit for the new year, “Museo’s Playlist” on Saturday night, February 2 from 5-7. The show continues through February 24th and will include a wide range of interpretations from the gallery artists. The invitation to submit work on the theme of music sent me back a few years to a moment that I have never forgotten, the debut of Bill Frisell’s “Big Sur”at Earshot Jazz. I came home from that performance transformed, and did a series of work called “Listening with an Innocent Ear,” in response. The series of work started with one charcoal drawing in black and white, deconstructed and transformed into color, much as music transforms one’s mood. “The Break” is about the moment when a jazz riff goes into uncharted territory.

When I revisited the work to refine, print and frame for the show I realized I wanted to go back to this theme, and have begun a new exploration of both the original compositions and some completely new ideas based on calligraphic ink drawing. I am super excited about the new directions, and urge you to visit me at Instagram to see the process evolve. Here is a variation on the original, and a glimpse of what’s ahead.

Intersection Music Print by Iskra — “Intersection, 1/5” © Iskra Johnson, archival pigment print on German Etching.

Iskra Ink Painting to Music — Improvisation Number 7, Ink on Paper

See process videos at #ink stories. My hand-held video skills may improve with a dive into some apps and hardware, coming soon. Meanwhile the main apps are my ears and my hands.

Existential Greetings! Ex Voto Paintings by Iskra

December 16, 2018 by Iskra 1 Comment

Ex-Voto painting by Iskra — “Ex-Voto for a Non-Believer,” from Sleep Studies. Available here.

It’s that existential season when structures reveal themselves, whether they are trees bare of leaves or beds bare of comfort. Winter can bring insomnia and questions of faith, along with powerful affirmation. Although December is a time of celebration, it is also often a time of passage, and anyone who has lost a parent or other loved one in this season knows the particular poignance of this confluence.

What better station to consider life, death, prayer, hope and all the indulgent remedies for these thoughts than the bed? [Read more…]

Driving While Dreaming, Two Studies of the Alaska Way Viaduct

February 21, 2014 by Iskra Leave a Comment

I am hard at work on my series of prints about the Alaska Way Viaduct. Big Bertha, our sensitive and emotionally overwrought digging machine is helping me out by quitting on the job. We may have several extra years to contemplate incipient ruin, the subtleties of patina and the beauty of going nowhere.

This morning I started on a new collage with Pandora in the background set to my favorite station, which I am guilty, guilty, guilty of listening to instead of finding each song individually or listening to mixtapes made by friends 30+ years ago. The station, wouldn’t you know, is named for the father of music for airports Brian Eno. I do like this phrase from the Rolling Stone review of 1979, “...there’s a good deal of high craftsmanship here, but to find it, you’ve got to thwart the music’s intent by concentrating.” The trick of collage is often to concentrate while not concentrating, a sleight of hand through which something interesting may appear. Mr. Eno and his friends are the perfect soundtrack to encourage this state of mind.

As I was working, shifting layers back and forth and on and off and testing all the ways two simple images can converse and transform each other, I thought about driving and the visual emotional space of the car, which is so entirely married to music. I got my first and only car, a gray Toyota Corolla, in 1989. I will never take it for granted. The first time I sat on a lookout at sunset and turned on the radio I had a kind of American Satori experience: so this is what they were talking about! I get to sit here in my room on the street and just turn the dial and look out at the view?

The view of course is what the lovers of the viaduct will miss the most when it comes down. It is the last populist vista, where you don’t have to pay big dollars to see The Mountains and the Sound which make us want to live here. When it is gone we will have to buy a multi-million dollar penthouse condo or use binoculars to peer across the six to eight lanes of traffic they propose to go on top of the tunnel, which by then will cost 10 dollars per trip and which no one will use because who wants to drive in the dark?? Hmmm.

The music of this situation is both requiem and anthem, weaving its modal intervals in and out in lane changes and near-misses and ultimately onto the great offramp of what-it-is. Requiem for what is to be lost, anthem for what we can still see if we ditch our worries about gas and earthquakes and just go for a drive. I checked Pandora to see what lovely song was transporting me: “Ballad of Distances” from The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid, and “Requiem for a Dream” by the Kronos Quartet. Gotta love this many-splendored synchronistic modern life.

Ballad Of Distances 1, Transfer Print, 10″ x 10″, © Iskra Johnson

Ballad Of Distances Part 2, © Iskra Johnson

Stay tuned for details on my upcoming show, “Excavations,” at Zeitgeist, opening the first week of April.

Listening with an Innocent Ear: Bill Frisell’s “Big Sur” at Earshot Jazz

November 12, 2013 by Iskra 3 Comments

The Shimmer, music collage — The Shimmer (Never use pink) © Iskra Johnson

I am neither a musician nor a music reviewer. For which I am quite grateful as I sit down to recall and review Bill Frisell’s Earshot Jazz debut of “Big Sur.” Free of musical expertise I can write this as a wine review, and try my best to convey the evening’s intoxication.

With my innocent ear I would say:

notes of Americana (the fiddler in his soft hat under the eaves in an Appalachian rain, the hop-skip polka and waltz, hints of hay);

minerality (chalk cliffs and blue swallows in morning light, brine of licked seashells first tasted and then put in your pocket);

bouquet (goldenrod and sunflowers nodding to an off-stage wind and saved from sentiment by a high cloud in a minor key that rescues yellow from banal happiness moving to joy and a state just shy of unapologetic rapture);

complexity (yes, the calico of polka and waltz but also sufis in white tennure whirling on the edge of a cliff, the generous embrace of dissonant drone and snake charmer smoke or is it a surfer’s campfire on the beach, Oh, Surfer Girl!);

And as I listen I think: this is a rare irreplaceable experience. So often when I go to live music I stand at the end, I clap and I leave, and as I walk out of the theater I cannot recall one note, just a vague blur of feeling. As I listened to Bill Frisell and his Big Sur Sextet something else happened. Even as my mind ran into the high meadows, the soaring skies and the surf of this very particular place I could hear with a second ear the jazzness of it, which has its own narrative that lives in no place at all except this exact moment. I could see each note as a shape and a color colliding and riding with the others. Tone shapes and weavings and world-weary minor bending to reliable blue. The sudden shock of melody, but unsure of what that would look like, so very viola it was. My vision tripped and refused to picture: perhaps melody, the one singable memory, is incense after all, or smoke. But snare and drum and brush and repeated incantation, I could see this.

The Break, Music collage — The Break © Iskra Johnson

Jazz of course can only be so sweet. Then they have to tear it all apart in the middle and that is when I want to get up and take a walk or go have a glass of lillet in a quiet room. The “break?”, the “bridge?” is this what they call it? Such anxiety it provokes. I always dread that they will never figure out how to put the pieces back together, and I move quickly from that to doubt in whatever “music” they were playing after all. Which as I opened my eyes to watch the violist tap her red shoe I realized is exactly the way collage works. It is music. And I decided to come back home and remember everything and try to see what I saw. I played “Big Sur” all day and constructed and reconstructed this image from an original black and white charcoal drawing, five variant files and over a hundred layers moving in (sound) space.

Listening to Bill Frisell, collage — Listening to Bill Frisell (Big Sur 1) © Iskra Johnson

Jazz In Black And White — Jazz in Black and White (Homage to Ben Nicholson) © Iskra Johnson

The original drawing on which these color collages are based.

Blue Sky in Seattle,Listening to Charles Lloyd on KBCS Caravan

May 17, 2011 by Iskra

This morning, with blue sky coming up through the mists outside the studio window, I am listening to Charles Lloyd on KBCS. Thank you John Gilbreath for the Caravan. Every morning from nine to noon I am in a groove sublime. This piece by Lloyd takes me to a time when the world seemed bright, and everything possible:

Baroque Morning, printing ink on paper, from Sleep Studies