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New Photographic Art from England

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Blue Swan on the River Wensum Swan in garland of branches
Blue Swan (The River Wensum)  ©Iskra Johnson
 
I have been home from England just over a month, and I am still in a state of wonder and dislocation. Thirty perfect days abroad, and now – insert quandary emoticon– normal life. This post will share a few first highlights of the trip and a glimpse of new work, more of which can be seen in this portfolio under Photography. 
 

I had many reasons for making the journey to England, after 30 years away. Any one of the reasons is a novella, which is why I am thinking of creating a new blog devoted to travel. Where to even begin? Perhaps with the question posed last week by friends who had just returned from Scandinavia and Prague: why England? To which I replied: The Wind in the Willows. That classic children’s book about Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad and their bucolic life along the river shaped my idea from the age of 6 of what countryside should look like. I was a child of the wide open west, where barbed wire and naked fenceposts divided the fields, you could drown in the murky depths of a horse trough, and a volcanic mountain filled the eastern door of the barn. Our river was a quarter mile down a steep cliff littered with rusted barrels and stalked by coyotes and mountain lions. 
 
My father gave me the Wind in the Willows when I entered 1st grade. I would sit in bed in the farmhouse and run my fingers over the illustrated endpapers, tracing a green quilt of soft hedgerows, a river you could easily row a boat down, a tiny bridge, a weir, and Pan’s Island, where, in Chapter 7, Rat, Mole, (and every susceptible child) could be awed by The Mystery. Page 133 still holds a four leaf clover and the browned paper on which I wrote out Rat’s failed attempt to describe, in words, the wordless presence of god. So yeah, I went to England to find that. It may explain why I could not stop following the swans. (Click on any print image to see details in shop.)

White Swan on the Avon River fine art print
White Swan on the Avon ©Iskra Johnson

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Iskra Summer Shows 2024

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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

Summer Solstice Flower Suite

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Chiaroscuro of the Garden

The Summer Solstice is a day to revel in color and light. Only a few peonies bloom in my dappled shade, but for a week I live in the intoxication of their perfume. Placed with a stray branch of mock orange, the blaze of peony against the darkness of night seems like a Solstice anthem, holding all the mysteries of darkness and light. When I was a child I thought the longest day of summer was July 15th, in the middle of those three calendar months I filled in with yellow crayons. The adult knows better. I could start brooding now about the coming darkness. Or I could take a walk in the garden . . .   

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Memorial Day Letter (to a Fellow Gardener)

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I am sitting in my garden, appreciating the beauty of the layered leaves. The cloud cover is that particular shade of Memorial Gray, neither dingy nor celebratory, but softly understanding of all griefs, personal or military. In just four weeks the air will be perfumed with firecrackers yet now, with similar flags flying and jets crisscrossing overhead it is wistful with the scent of suntan oil still confined to its bottle and smoke from rain-dampened barbecue.

Earlier I took a walk along the shore where low tide exposed 5 feet of  barnacles white as tombstones and rank with rotting seaweed. Golden Gardens had been strung with nets and swarmed with the hopeful and half-dressed leaping and shouting and willing the ball to land on the right side. The glory of the season’s first bare feet, and sand rising in slow motion like salt spray around the players. Along the edge families shivered and fussed with potato salad and waited for heat to reach the searing stage, impatient for plates to fill and for conversation to become interesting. Miles away in a sea of asphalt the Veterans of Foreign Wars handed out red poppies and tried to explain poetry.

Flanders Field
Now, becalmed from half a mile of stairs and the discipline of the walk I do think I could spend a month or so just gazing at the Stewartia as it peels its bark and offers the miraculous evolution of blossom from polished green pearl to alabaster brooch to intricate ink-black pod. Right now it has almost everything on it at once except for the white flowers. When they fall they are purely nuisance. When they bloom it is a five-petaled rondeau that stops all thought but wonder. 

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

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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…]