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You are here: Home / Archives for Travel

The Color of the Year is Nostalgia: Happy New Year, Hello 2025

December 31, 2024 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Be Happy Poster

The design authorities have nominated “Mocha Mousse” as the color of the year, suggesting to me that either The Onion has taken over, or the members of The Color Board need to up their anti-depressants.  A color of “subtle elegance and sensorial richness?” Think again: perhaps of global warming and how the coffee bean so many of us rely on for optimism is rapidly becoming extinct. Sorry! Mocha Mousse is about pillows! Beige linen against a gray couch, and wall paint that costs $95 per gallon. Neutrals and browns are hard, I get it. I’m sure it takes a full year to get the shades just right.

However. Looking forward to 2025, from a city often drenched in dispiriting shades of mud, I nominate the Color of the Year as Nostalgia. I just can’t, right now, look into the future. I need to rest in the soft duotones and bad color separations of childhood. Toys were tin, cotton had not yet been invaded by plastic, the inside of a sleeping bag was 100% flannel, smelling of Irish setters and woodsmoke. Who wouldn’t want to live there again?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Photography, The Spiritual in Art, Travel

New Photographic Art from England

October 16, 2024 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Photography, Prints, Travel

Sources of Inspiration: Hokusai and England

November 6, 2023 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Japanese Garden in Fall photography by Iskra
A Moment of Refuge, Seattle Japanese Garden ©Iskra Johnson

October in the Pacific Northwest is a moody season. The rains have come, and the fugue state of grayness that leads to indoors brooding requires acts of increasing will to resist. Sunday I felt myself on the cusp of succumbing to what the Buddhists aptly call The Third Hindrance of Sloth and Torpor. Seattle’s caffeine economy is built on what may seem like indulgence: yet consumption of caffeine is actually the first step in Spiritual Effort. I dutifully poured three cups of tea and purified my mind.

Once prodded out the door and feeling clouds on my face I came back to life. The innumerable grays of our skies offer a perfect foil for color, and walking through the blur of crimsons, burnt gold and lichens filled me with calm elation. Still facing East after seeing SAM’s Hokusai, I prolonged the spell of the exhibit with a visit to the Japanese Garden. As I walked through the Japanese garden each tree and stone seemed redrawn in ink in isometric perspective, and I half expected my viewfinder to appear with parallelograms drawn across the glass.Hokusai at Seattle Art Museum details paper and wabi sabi

When we are barraged daily with thousands of images seen online it is easy to forget the power of an image seen literally on screen, as in a painting on a folding screen of silk, from hundreds of years ago, holding history present with the physicality of thread. My favorite images from the Hokusai prints showed the ghost seepage of aged rice paste and seams where sheets of paper or silk overlapped. Seen close I noticed embossments of cloud forms I had never caught in reproductions, and this evidence of the physical making impressed memory on me as a bodily thing, amplifying the exhibit’s power. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Abstract Calligraphy, Travel Tagged With: Christopher Neve Unquiet Landscape, Cultural Appropriation, Hokusai at Seattle Art Museum, Hokusai influences, Modern minimalism, modern sumi, Seattle artist blog, The Pillow Book

Western Landscape Photography Portfolio

December 15, 2020 by Iskra 1 Comment

Gate to the West Photography by Iskra
Gate to the West,©Iskra Fine Art

 

New Directions: Photographs of the Western Landscape

Are there affirmable days or places in our deteriorating world? Are there scenes in life, right now, for which we might conceivably be thankful? Is there a basis for joy or serenity, even if felt only occasionally? Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?

– Robert Adams

In October I found myself in the middle of an ocean of grass almost swallowed by basalt. I looked up at the black palisade of stone stacked against sky, a magpie’s wing shadowing the trail ahead, and asked out loud: “Is this a photograph? Should I follow this impulse? Landscape photography isn’t what I really do…..”

There was long pause as my walking companion vanished around a bend. The field caught the slant of afternoon sun like knife blades, each edge of grass etched against stone. The moment seemed to command me to see and record in a way I was not accustomed to – not with the collage artist’s eye for disassemblage, but as a witness to the exact 1/60th of a second in front of me. I raised my camera and started shooting, unsure of why, but thinking maybe I’d figure it out before the sun set.

Although I have been obsessed with cameras and photography for much of my life, I have never considered myself a traditional “photographer.” Rather, I have seen the camera as way to inquire and to be present in place. The images made have always been secondary to the experience that looking through a lens affords. The technology of f-stops and aperture and ASA, the confounding dials with microscopic lines between here and my destination, and the chance, in analog days, of a precious 36 exposures tripping on a sprocket, all seemed to require a full time German in residence, and I am much more Irish. I have always been immune to systems, and I suffer from profound dyslexia when it comes to math. Someone asked me recently if this new series of landscape photographs was made using the “zone system” and I had to check my voluminous and completely disorganized notes – oh yes, that.  My process is intuitive, and overlays multiple systems based on the aesthetics of printmaking and drawing.­

In making photographic prints I am looking for luminance and iconic form, and a sense in the body of being there. Are there ten shades of gray from white to black – who cares? Does it feel and look like memory and the way the air moved? Can I smell the smoke in the air, or the sage, or hear the sound basalt makes as it cools down between late afternoon and evening?

Canyon Creek Tree Photo by Iskra
Canyon Creek Tree,©Iskra Fine Art

[Read more…]

Filed Under: American West Landscape Photography, Photography, Road Trips Tagged With: big sky landscape photography, Duotone Photography, forest fire landscape photography, Modern Landscape Photography, Tieton landscape, Washington State Apple Industry, Western Landscape Photography

New Landscapes | Memories of the Farm

November 5, 2017 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Pastorale No. 1 | The Copse, archival pigment limited edition print © Iskra Johnson

At about 5 in the afternoon you sit on the fence and rock your legs against the barn wood and pick splinters out of your knees in between watching the light that angles across the fields. The wind ripples and makes three shades of green light and you sing America the Beautiful without even knowing it is corny. You are nine years old or maybe 10, and braid your hair with horse ribbons. The word ribbon becomes part of your intimate knowing of the world: mane, braid, field, wind….

I have been away for awhile roaming the landscape of the Skagit to create a new series for an upcoming solo show at Perry and Carlson in March. The new work, which I am calling “Industrial Pastorale,” is a very personal evolution of imagery that explores the liminal edge between rural and urban landscape. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture & Sense of Place, Digital Collage, Prints, Road Trips Tagged With: Andrew Wyeth, barn art, iskra upcoming shows, mixed media prints, pastoral art, rustic art, skagit valley, Wallace Stevens

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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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