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You are here: Home / Archives for The Spiritual in Art

The Gardener Takes a Walk Under the Full Moon | A Valentine

February 14, 2022 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Moon and cloud courtship

They tell you the moon is cold, if you read the studies.

It’s just some kind of silt made of shredded stars and forgotten planets burnished and abraded by cosmic winds without any feeling at all. It is purely accident, a slip of a cartoonist’s pen, that causes us to see things that don’t exist.

Man, Goddess, pick one, or pick both. It may pull the tides, it may make women crazy and men confused, but it is, in fact,

scientifically proven to be genderless:

the moon is an It.

Tell that to the Redwood and the Elm, Cedar, Spruce, their ink-black armature against the hyacinth sky designed to curtain the clouds and moon in courtship.

Moon in Trees

Knowing that last month’s Janus-faced equivocations had slipped into history and that now was unequivocally coming; seeing the tulip break from its monotonous green gloves and say (this very day,) Red, the Gardener knew the situation was urgent. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Gardener's Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena, The Spiritual in Art Tagged With: Lyric essay, Moon and cloud, St. Valentine essay, Valentines Day

New Years’ Eve: In Which the Gardener Takes a Moment to Reflect

December 31, 2021 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Winter garden New years Eve

(Excerpt, from The Gardner’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena December 31, 2021)

The first thing the Gardener noticed on the morning of December 31 was the color of the snow. The sun had emerged after days of gray and bitter cold, and as shadows stole across the land they brought with them a new color, “warmth,” transforming the drifts and vaguely monstrous shapes of the shrubs into benign presence. The light most particularly touched the robins, who demand warmth to ignite their color fully. On the dogwood branches the robins sat, eastward facing, their chests swelling and feathers plumping as though they had been feasting all week instead of pecking amidst tire tracks for the carcasses of worms. In another garden a varied thrush had fallen to its frozen death with a sound like lead and been buried with ceremony, its dark necklace enveloped in garnet strings and rubies as befits a prince.

Last year the gargoyle had reigned over the pond with his broken wing. For 40 years his gnarled features gave purchase to every bird who came to sit and drink from the spout pouring water. Each December, through the incantations of ancient fractals, the water carved a heart from the ice, a wet obsidian streaked by the occasional golden contrails of fish. Each year the birds descended in order of size: first the crows, then the flickers, then the robins, sparrows, chickadees and towhees, and lastly, the shy wren. The Gardener did nothing on these days but observe and laugh, and all was good.

 

The Gargoyle of Christmas Past

Long ago….. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Meditation & Buddhism, The Garden, The Spiritual in Art Tagged With: Kuan yin, new years 2021, pandemic new year, the gardener's almanac of irreproducible phenomena, the shell, What a year

Iskra in A Wing and A Prayer at Museo Gallery

January 19, 2021 by Iskra Leave a Comment

A Wing and a Prayer at Museo Gallery

I am excited to be part of A WING AND A PRAYER opening at Museo Gallery January 20th, with artists Elena Korakianitou, Michael Dickter, Faith Scott Jessup and Jean Whitesavage.

“A celebration of our ultimate optimism for our world, our embrace of transformation, and a recognition that we may need a little divine help along the way.  Opening on a significant day both politically and astrologically, January 20th,  Museo hopes that this show will encourage peace and hope.”

Museo is open 11-6 Thursday through Monday.
Tuesdays & Wednesdays by chance, or by appointment.

The show will continue through March 1st.

MUSEO GALLERY
215 First Street | P O Box 548
Langley, WA 98260
360.221.7737
museo@whidbey.com

I will be showing my recent series of limited edition images based on statues of angels, some available framed or mounted on panel, and others available unframed at the gallery or through the Gallery website. The language of statues is one of many ways I’ve explored the distance between sky and earth. This piece, a variation on the myth of Icarus, will be available at the gallery to see in person.

Icarus 3 by Iskra
Icarus 3, © Iskra Fine Art, variant edition print, several sizes, available to see now at Museo.

If you have the time to make a day of it I suggest a walk on Double Bluff. Eastern clouds may take their shape from the land, but island clouds listen only to the sky.

Cloud forms at Double Bluff Whidbey Island by Iskra
Cloud Forms, Double Bluff ©Iskra Fine Art

Filed Under: Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Photography, The Spiritual in Art Tagged With: A Wing and A Prayer, angel art, Celestial themes, Double Bluff Beach, Iskra Fine Art Gallery shows, Langley Art Shows, museo gallery, wings

Who is Your Muse?

December 30, 2018 by Iskra 1 Comment

Muse Mermaid by Iskra

“Letters . . . art’s sweet hooky.”– Lorrie Moore

“I admire your guts in the midst of strangers.”– Dawn Powell

When you make a painting or a drawing do you address it to someone, as you would a letter? And if you do, what does it mean, to “address?” There is the verb: the shout, murmur, scrawl, the beseeching wail and the twirling in circles trying to see what the paint won’t reveal. And there is the noun: the housing. That is where the Muse lives, if you believe in such things.

The origin of the word “address” is from the French, adrecier, “To go straight toward, straighten, set right, point, direct.” Yet the relationship with a Muse is anything but a straight line. It is an unpredictable courtship, a not-so-fair trade of creative work in return for the recognition of meaning. I have always needed a muse, and it has felt sometimes like a weakness, a quirk of sentiment that has gone out of fashion. Men get them, of course, but – women? They are supposed to be the Muse, right? Women are expected to get their ideas immaculately, from thin air, without the whispers of naked sylphs leaning in to their ears. Either that or they fall under the spell of Pygmalian, shaped and molded by the all-powerful man, and spend the rest of their lives giving him the credit.

You might think these are parodies, ancient points of view long discarded. But just leaf back a few years, to the 1950’s, or even, let’s get specific, to 1974. Until that year, only 44 years ago, a woman could not get her own credit card without her husband’s signature. That woman would be my mother, who confronted this reality in her diary as she considered divorce in the 1970’s.

This month I have been helping my mother sort her historical archives and personal papers. It has been a dizzying trip back in time, excavating the corners of her 1910 pink Victorian. Stacked under the stair of a closet we found a dozen forgotten boxes of history. As we opened them we discovered, interspersed with manifestos and personal letters, early issues of MS, Lilith, Off Our Backs, and Pandora, among countless quarterlies and pamphlets about every imaginable movement for social justice. My mother has been a life-long writer and journalist, and a passionate advocate for feminism. In her prolific archives I can trace the path from compliant goddess to bohemian to a woman on the front lines of women’s liberation. I can see how raw and how recent the past is. I can see how hard-won and personal the journey has been, and how important the act of writing letters and journals is in living history and being conscious that you are living it.

These boxes of paper have dusty, pungent physical presence. The smell of old and well-traveled paper is like no other. If you throw out a remnant of this vintage without looking, it will come looking for you later and crumple you in its fist. So you look. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Spiritual in Art Tagged With: artist inspiration, Artist Muse, ken nordine, letters to my mother, The Muse, Who is your Muse?

Meditation on the Winter Solstice, 2015

December 22, 2015 by Iskra 3 Comments

Winter Solstice, 2015

“I shut my eyes in order to see.”— Gauguin

 

The-Pale-House
The Pale House, printing ink on paper, © Iskra Johnson

There are structures designed to withstand earthquakes and there are structures built to slowly decay. These are scaffolds of membranes that melt under rain and light until the wind can blow through, rocking them lightly back and forth. The seed, meant to escape, might remain for years, seemingly weightless, but weight enough to keep the structure anchored. Time moves around it.

I lived for awhile, many years ago, in a former Catholic monastery. The light that came in through stained glass and wooden shutters filled the rooms with rare colors and a sense that every moment within had been granted or won. In this domain  I couldn’t make a cup of tea without a sense of ceremony. In the morning I would choose a cup, pour boiling water through a silver weir and thick black leaves, and settle with my Earl Grey on the back stairs behind the kitchen. There I could sit and watch the world awaken through the steam of bergamot. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mixed Media, Object Lessons: Essays and images inspired by "A History of the World in 100 Objects.", The Garden, The Spiritual in Art Tagged With: botanical art, home, meditation, mixed media, object lessons, organic architecture, tomatillo, winter solstice

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I am getting ready to start a new photographic-bas I am getting ready to start a new photographic-based series that I’ll be working on for the next six months. A friend here on Instagram gave me these praying hands years and years ago. They are quietly gaudy, and awful and simultaneously completely wonderful. I see them every day when I wake up in a house that I will confess is filled with devotional objects. This image is composed of two photographs, the sculpture and a street kiosk. When I walk down the streets, I cannot resist documenting kiosks, particularly when they are empty. The shredded strange paint residues and the battered metal frames are just waiting to be re-purposed as though the entire street was my personal goodwill junk department. Or you could call it a library. My cross training for the series is reading Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness, novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s writing gives an artist permission to own their interior world. Of course, letting the exterior world in on the secret can be quite a task. That is, what studio time is for…
I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendsh I am thankful today for the symmetries of friendship, even when they are asymmetric; for the guidance of those in the temple, who have practiced for years and send us their notes and their breathing lessons; thankful for the leaf that my friend saved for me of all the leaves in her neighborhood and thankful to the man who came yesterday when my back had laid me flat to sweep and to blow, as he noted in his documentation, 95% of the leaves in my garden, into piles then compressed with military precision into small liftable bundles stacked like muffins under the eaves. Now we can look out at the spare empty spaces. Feel the freedom of silence and space between branches. Rest, as growth goes quiet and invisible in the best growing season of the year.

May your Thanksgiving be bright✨
Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Artist Reception at SAM Gallery tomorrow, Seattle Art Museum First Avenue level, 2-4! Hope to see you there for our group show celebrating 50 years(!) This piece is called Water Kimono, a reverie on the ever-changing patterns of light on water.
My Narnia My Narnia
Last night I tried to get through more than 20 min Last night I tried to get through more than 20 minutes of the Golden Bachelor. It was Pickleball-date afternoon. The Golden Bachelor, truly a lovely man to observe and listen to under normal circumstances delivered this line: “Pickleball is a regular part of my life. Any woman who is going to share my life must also share Pickleball.” 

God help us. I’ve never been able to hit a ball with a paddle or a sock or a bat or anything else. Combat sports, like music, are abstract. No matter how much I pre-visualize the zen moment, the ball somehow remains in the air unrelated to my weapon of choice. I want to see the next Golden Bachelor rewritten for painters. “He said, fingering the smear of cadmium on his eyebrow, “Painting is a very big part of my life, and any woman who marries me is going to have to live with Painting.” Will he also say “I hope she paints too?” And we’ll have a full time maid and cook? Or will he say “She must be able to bring me my pipe and my slipper at the end of the day. And take the dogs for long walks alone while I try to decide the color of the sky?”

Feel free to write the script below.
A time and memory experiment. Photography captures A time and memory experiment. Photography captures a moment in light. You put the moment away for 30 years, lose the album several times, and then it resurfaces, the old analog print in perfect form. What happens if the small print is then scanned and enlarged? And revisited as the half-forgotten? This image from Koyasan was printed small in the first run and did not look like much of anything. On 17 x 22 it is lovely, and at full size of 24 x 36 it is something else altogether. Unlike enlargements of digital photographs analog images are simply soft, without the artifacts of pixel interpolation. How curious that what was originally 4x6 looks best at least 400% larger.

Photography is such a powerful tool to explore memory and what it means to forget and remember. The idea that we must live authentically in the “Now” (or that there IS a “now” unfiltered by the past) is perplexing for a meaning seeker. I always have a memory, no matter how small and distant, crumpled in my back pocket. Perhaps like homeopathic tinctures the smaller the memory the more space it can fill.

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