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The Tarmac Residency: Airport Landscapes by Iskra (with gratitude to Brian Eno)

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Airplane wing and contrail photograph by Iskra
Cloud Horizon © Iskra Johnson

Last month I traveled by air for the first time in three years. Since March 2020 pandemic had kept me on a short leash between yard and living room, paying off the bills for cancelled trips. During this time I shrank my world to the space allowed and let myself forget how much I love airports, that vast impermanent canvas where the elegance of infrastructure and messiness of human drama intersect. I had also forgotten that an airport is not just a means to a destination, but a state of mind.

My favorite part of the day is the seconds between sleeping and waking: the space between.  “Liminal  state” is the term for that which is neither here nor there, and it’s a territory of enormous freedom. In an airport the liminal reigns. You aren’t supposed to be anywhere: your only duty is to look out the window. There, from your rocking chair in the Knoxville Recomposure Station, or the bar in Houston, you are completely justified in simply admiring the tarmac. A labyrinth of geometry and human industry, it is well worth study, however long the layover.

Liminal Landscape 1 Airport Tarmac by Iskra
Liminal Landscape 1 ©Iskra Johnson

The soundtrack for this travelers’ cinema, and for my creative journey, is inextricably entwined with Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. Probably no other music has affected my way of working and seeing the world more than this seminal album from 1978. Eno and his band of ambient brothers gave authority to the dreaming imagination and sparked an entirely new genre of music. On first hearing, (on a Sony boombox), it became my home. When I began traveling for work as a typographer and designer I discovered that artists in Denmark and Holland were also inking serifs and coding alphabets to Harold Budd, Lyle Mays (listen to the aptly named Before You Go), Eno, Eluvium and others. Standing at a conference in Oxford trading music with Danish type designers, knowing that at 2 AM we were working to the same sounds, brought the world full circle. It also meant that I wasn’t crazy to value ambiance, and by extension visual atmospherics, as much as drama and plot.

I did not expect to come home from a journey to see fireflies in Knoxville to make 18 prints about flight. But two things happened en route to my destinations: the Houston airport stripped off its carpet and left a concrete floor, and I had a conversation with a stranger on a plane. What happened next is either a case of attention deficit syndrome or simply what it is to be an artist. [Read more…]

Save the Date! Holiday Sale at Studio C December 4th 2021, Plus New Collage Works

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The Mariner’s Dream, ©Iskra Johnson

“The Mariner’s Dream,” is a new addition to the ongoing project of The Floating World. If you are lost at sea, (or maybe watching The Titanic in your starry night print pajamas at 2 AM) you might wonder just how large the moon should be as it rises, and where exactly in the sky it will appear. Is it true that nothing should ever be in the middle of the sky? And what if a cloud enters the lower right corner: does that make it ok? If you are also lost in a world where things are (still not) normal, and wondering if the hands on the clock will ever return to count the minutes, this image may speak to you. I found the moon about 23 years ago in a flea market in Lisbon. I carried it and a dozen other timeless planets to the border of Spain and back, and then home where they landed in one of the tableaus of mystery objects I keep around the house, waiting for their moment to tell me something new. This Sunday time’s planet floated into the sky and resurrected an image from another era that apparently I was not quite finished with.

It is true, I have actually been watching the Titanic, in my celestial themed pajamas. I have been avoiding the part where it all goes down – Leonardo and Kate never looked so good, and I want them to stay that way forever. Meanwhile, the world insists otherwise. In the supply chain catastrophe of our New Normal 50 cargo containers are right now afloat off the shore of Vancouver island, and the ship itself is on fire. I pray that the mariners are safe, and that nobody’s home remodeling project, (bathtubs? refrigerators?) or landscape painting book that they spent years writing are in those containers. Who knew that “supply chain” would be everything? It’s all got me thinking about time and distance and faith. The bigness and the smallness. And interdependence.

I never got to blogging about the opening at SAM for Rising Tides. Thank you so much for every one who came to the opening and for the support of our work. Above, Tallmadge Doyle, me, and Jueun Shin without our masks for a split second. I am grateful to team Pamela and Lindsey at the gallery and the other artists for making this first SAM Gallery show of the season a success. I was especially happy that Barge (Salmon Bay) an image from a previous body of work, found a home, with a collector who described my work as “elegant, industrial, and psychedelic.” Faith and time: I had exactly one psychedelic experience, on a hilltop in Virginia when I was 16, and I’m still running with it. Artists are often told that “currency is everything” – yet my experience has been the exact opposite. Art and life are a long game, and this month work that is anywhere from 15 years to a month old has made its way to someone’s walls. Faith. Ideas appear for a reason which may never explain itself, but we have to trust and build on what the tides bring in. What we judge as detritus can become gold, or at least a shiny fishing lure, over times’ passage.

Barge (Salmon Bay) on canvas
Barge (Salmon Bay) on canvas

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Thoughts on the Act of Editing: Photographic Reality, and How you Look at a Forest Fire

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Forest Tree Portrait photograph by Iskra
Interregnum, ©Iskra Fine Art (Available in two sizes, click image to see details.)

New Directions: Western Landscape Photography Part 1

 

Today I have been living with this tree, captured originally in full color (though muted and overcast) in a forest east of the mountains. I say, “this tree,” but you, the viewer, might not be seeing the same tree I am. You might be seeing the tree on the right, scorched by fire, and interlaced with the bleached needles of a pine that may or may not see spring. I am aware of that tree also. But in the moment of stepping into this meadow what stood out against the uneven and patchy hill was the shimmering tree with yellow leaves and white bark. In a soundscape emptied of birds the wind in its leaves made the only sound.

As I go back in time to this moment the digital darkroom allows me to ask “What is this story about?” countless times, and each time to come up with a different answer. A voice I’ve heard often says “People don’t like dark. Make it light, make it hopeful.” Leonard Cohen speaks up on another station and says, helpfully “Make it darker,” as for that poet the darker the shadows the brighter the illumination. In developing a photographic print I cycle through decision after decision, undoing, saving, revisiting, doubting, knowing, unknowing. Each revision of value rewrites light’s story, saying: the point is the mountain, or the pines, or the sky. Finally it may land on this, perhaps a tale of the heroine in white, surrounded by courtiers and knights and armies in the distance.

In the forests around Yakima the shape of the aspens tug at a memory of the archaic, and make me think of Joan of Arc in a book I saw as a child. The pages of the book were engraved and brown at the edges, pungent with age. Joan sat on her horse deep in a copse, her armor camouflaged by dappled light, her sword glinting. The style was detailed, each leaf individually drawn and burnished against a pewter sky. In the grove, momentarily safe, Joan was thinking, and gathering herself. On my hikes I kept looking for her, expecting her to ride forth, tossing her hair as she leaned under a branch, turned a corner on the trail, and paused to look out into the distance. What would Joan have said? Dark or light, or a middle tone? I am not sure, but her horse would have led up the canyon into the fire, which was still smoking. [Read more…]

Introducing the Sweet Old World Series

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Ancestor Memories

 

Today’s post introduces work from a new series called Sweet Old World. The title comes from a Lucinda Williams song which I listened to for years until the tape sputtered out. Its bittersweet chord progressions operate as a homeopathic tincture for melancholy, virus panic, and stock market crash and immediately put things in perspective.

In going through the family archives this winter I found a small cache of silver gelatin photographs from the late 1800’s, and I have been living with them for months, buttering my toast under the watchful eye of ladies in white, their starched gowns tinted pale shades of sepia. I have always loved the mysterious blurs and emulsion fog of Tintype and other early photographic techniques. I began my work as a printmaker in film photography and etching on copper and zinc. As I have put these new images together it is through the lens of the past and the aesthetic of an earlier time. The work is composed from my original photography, paint, and varieties of modern alchemy. It falls loosely into three categories: architecture, botanica and resonant objects. I will be developing the different bodies of work over time, while I also work on paintings.

 

Farmstead landscape print by IskraFarmstead, © Iskra Fine Art.  

Nostalgia was originally described as a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause” by Johannes Hoffer, the Swiss doctor who coined the term in 1688. Military physicians speculated that its prevalence among Swiss mercenaries abroad was due to earlier damage to the soldiers’ ear drums and brain cells by the unremitting clanging of cowbells in the Alps.” 

 

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Winter Walk | New Year’s Greetings from Iskra

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Winter Walk Print by Iskra
“Winter Walk,” limited edition print © Iskra Johnson

Greetings in the new year! As I write this the rain has lifted in spite of the emoticon insisting otherwise on my phone. Outside the studio window the trees are shimmering, in delicate shades of umber and sap. I will be going for my New Year’s walk soon, but I want first to send out this letter of thanks to friends and collectors for your support of my work over this past year. Although my attention was often elsewhere, preoccupied with family and personal loss, this turned out to be the best year I have ever had in art. I have never felt more grateful for the opportunities of this path, and am filling notebooks with new ideas that keep me up until the wee hours.

The new year brings some shifts in focus and refinements of direction. Although I will continue to do prints, in multiple ongoing themes ranging from natural landscapes to architecture and industry, I am also returning to drawing and the roots of contemplative art. For much of my life calligraphy was my daily practice and also my livelihood. The practice of 26 simple forms kept me clear and laser focused: it is not possible to do calligraphy without being in the moment. Photography is also an art of the moment, and of awareness, but with the introduction of digital methods and the printmaking processes it is also mind-bendingly technical. One can very quickly forget to breathe, and accordingly shut off the pathways to seeing that come only through working directly with one’s hands.

Last month I officially retired from my career in design to focus full time on art. Letters will continue to appear, but in new forms, not as corporate identities or book titles, but as visual art and as essays. Honoring the path I took in lettering and all that it taught me, I have returned to the morning practices of handwriting and drawing as meditation, which opens up a whole new-old world of contour, shape, representation, chiaroscuro. I am sharing my process on Instagram and find the community there to be wonderfully supportive (including in bringing me new tools, like the marvelous 3-point ball point pen from renowned artist Nicolas Sanchez.) Instagram is my laboratory for bringing worlds together: narrative, poetry, photography, community and contemplation. From the act of making process visible my work takes leaps it would not think of in the privacy of my own studio.

Concentration drawing of a moon shell by Iskra

So it turns out ballpoint pen was just a starter drug to pencil. I have never been able to draw happily with a pencil and suddenly here it is and I love it, thank you hb graphite and mornings listening to jazz to keep the thinking mind quiet. To draw is to find the horizon. A shell is a vast landscape with one curved edge and beyond it is the sea and the sun and the moon. To draw a moon shell is to sneak up on it. I always love best the white space and for me I go on tiptoes with very soft feet before committing to the form.

If you are used to seeing architecture here and wondering about consistency, don’t for one minute be fooled…. A shell is a house by any other name.

My limited edition prints can be seen in a beautiful ongoing display now at Museo Gallery on Whidbey Island, and in a new venture out of Paris that I will share more about as it develops. I am offering a range of new prints in my shop available to browse online or in studio visits. The two forest images here are from a series based on winter walks. I love taking digital methods and transforming them through a classic aesthetic. I approach the making of a digital photographic print as I used to approach darkroom printing, dodging and burning, proofing, squinting, and always keeping in the foreground a sense of printerlyness and paper. The forest series is a vestige of an older world, when there were Currier and Ives plates lined up on the mantel, and the forest was eternal. This series, like the Traveler’s Suite, is intimate scale, 12 x 16 on a 17 x 22 sheet.

I wish you a beautiful beginning to the new decade. May the weather emoticon work with us more often than not, and bring at least as much light as dark. And may we all look up and see the sky.

Forest Grove Fine Art Print by iskra
“Forest Grove” limited edition archival pigment print © Iskra Johnson

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