Iskra Fine Art

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You are here: Home / Archives for Photocollage

Celebrate the Beauty of Swans: Holiday Print Sale, Twenty Percent off!

December 2, 2024 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Navigation ©Iskra Johnson

A big thank you to the friends and collectors who came out to my open studio and party November 16th! You made the year a great one, and work continues to go out the door, as those who could not make the open house stop by to visit. There were many requests for the swans to appear as cards, and as promised, they are now live, in The Swans Suite in my shop. All of the works are available as larger prints as well. A few of the swans are available only as larger prints. I may make a second Swans stationary collection as time goes on.

As a holiday thank you I am offering a 20% discount in my shop from now through the Solstice. If you have had your eye on a larger piece this is your chance to save big on any purchase over $150, cards excluded. Enter SOLSTICE24 at check out.

A note on upcoming price increases: Due to the inflation of costs for ink, paper and postage, I will be raising prices to catch up next year. This is one of your last chances to purchase cards at the current rate of 6 for $33

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Filed Under: Construction/Reconstruction, Photocollage, Print Sale, Prints Tagged With: 20 percent off print sale, bird stationary, swan art cards, swan prints

Iskra Summer Shows 2024

July 24, 2024 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Looking At You, mixed process print, variable sizes, © Iskra Johnson

I’ve just dropped new work off at SAM Gallery for the upcoming show, “Splash!” opening August 10, from 2-4 PM. Work from my Immersions series will be included with water-inspired works from SAM Gallery artists Cara Jaye, Joe Max Emminger, Andy Eccleshall and Kate Protage. 

While I am in England a show based on Seattle landscape featuring four of my industrial and maritime works will open at Chatwin Arts. Keep your eye on their Instagram for the opening!

Eventide, © Iskra Johnson

Downtown was beautiful this morning. Trucks roared, dumpsters clanged, fish flew and tourists flocked the waterfront. Shifting double exposures refracted from windows in the sky. Pigeons! There is a palpable excitement this week as Seattle Art Fair opens and greets the art spirit.

When I got home there was a note from Seattle Office of Arts and Culture about Hope Corps. I’m sharing it here, in hopes you will respond or pass it along. This is a promising sign of new opportunities for artists in the city:

The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture (ARTS) invites individual artists, cultural producers, arts administrators, creative workers, community groups, and arts and cultural organizations to apply to Hope Corps.

You can apply by proposing projects that generate career opportunities for the local creative workforce, and contribute to the well-being of Seattle’s downtown community with community-driven projects, events, performances, and more.

Envisioned as an economic recovery program for Seattle’s creative workforce, Hope Corps connects under- and unemployed artists, creative workers, and culture keepers with career opportunities that benefit the public. The 2025 Hope Corps program is part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan, and funding will go towards projects that employ creative workers through activations in Seattle’s downtown neighborhoods:

Belltown, Central Downtown, Chinatown-International District, Denny Triangle, Pioneer Square, Stadium District.

Proposed projects should be unique events or activations, taking place in 2025 in street-level, accessible, outdoor or otherwise publicly visible spaces that provide engaging experiences for the public and bring audiences downtown.

Grants range from $5,000 – $50,000 to support creative worker wages and project expenses.


If you do nothing else in the next few days, do go swimming! And if you aren’t at the lake, see you at the Art Fair…

The Sailboat New Media by Iskra

Filed Under: Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Photocollage, Photography, Prints

New Images from The Gardener’s Almanac: Hydrangea!

October 22, 2023 by Iskra Leave a Comment

From the Gardener’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena: The Hydrangea

As the autumn rains come, I notice the squirrel’s moods are completely unaffected. The squirrel has never bothered to look up, whisker the the winds of change and pause for melancholy. His job is to keep his head down, dig up every newly potted bulb and chrysanthemum and shred the babytears growing between the pavers – and he does not stop to admire the hydrangeas. Praising flowers with long and homely names is my occupation.

The delicate colors of Hydrangea macrophylla normalis are welcome distraction from the calamities unfolding beyond the garden. I hope you will find respite in the Autumn Suite from the Gardener’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena, just published and available today in my shop. For my fellow writers and thinkers and keepers of friendships far flung, these are excellent with ginger biscuits and strong coffee or black tea with honey. All you need is a table, a pen and a quiet moment.

Hydrangea in Amber botanical image and greeting card
Hydrangea in Amber

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Filed Under: Botanical Art, Botanical Art Cards, Photocollage Tagged With: botanical art from Iskra I, botanical greeting cards, hydrangea, the Gardnener's Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena

May 1, 2023 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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/

Filed Under: Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Painting, Photocollage

Disrupted Architecture: Studio Process and New Prints

November 18, 2021 by Iskra Leave a Comment

In the studio I have been returning to typographic practice in a new abstract way. These recent pieces are a mix of ink drawing, photography and collage composed with my process of digital alchemy. Buildings are big, the body is . . . human sized. These pieces consider scale, in terms of both architecture and maker. Largeness interrupted by the slightness of a memory, a figure, the intimate handprint of dirt and atmosphere and time. They continue the Construction/Reconstruction series based on construction sites and ruins and the blurred space in between.

In a break from my usual process I am beginning with pure drawing, using for my “brush” tools made of wood and steel that have hard edges designed for the work of construction. Working either from a photograph or memory I explore architectural space as I would a letterform: drawing the structure and drawing the air around it. Along the way I have found myself in the pure territory of composition, revisiting the lessons of Mondrian and the austerities of the Bauhaus.

The first set of images here show early studies that go back and forth between drawing and digital blending. The completed pieces that follow are all editioned as archival pigment prints. As with my other new media work they are not reproductions of paintings, but contemporary printmaking in which the print itself is the final art. 

New Typographics Process ink drawings

New Typographics Process ink drawings

As I scanned and deconstructed the original drawings I entered what I think of as a Mid-Century Modern Moment. Mondrian hovered at my shoulder and advised. It was a rigorous process of sacrifice and minimalisation that shaped his path from “drawing a tree” to knowing the space between branches. Although I always thought his older work was emotionally bloodless, the sense of mystery in his reductive methods stayed with me. Pieces like “Broadway Boogie Woogie” are as much a part of my DNA as formica and ashtray mosaics – and they come with a great soundtrack. By working with ink and soft absorbent papers incapable of truly hard edges I have invited the human element to re-surface. The piece below is as much about the sensual experience of paper as it is about the mind.

A Conversation with Mondrian, mid century style abstract
A Conversation with Mondrian, © Iskra Fine Art, archival pigment print, size variable

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Filed Under: Architecture & Sense of Place, Digital Collage, Photocollage Tagged With: Building C Studios Open House, construction site art, disrupted architecture, Iskra Architectural Prints, new media architectural art

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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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