Iskra Fine Art

  • Prints
    • The Tarmac Residency: Airport Landscapes
    • Immersions | At The Shore
    • ColorBath: Images of the Harbor
    • The Floating World
    • Industrial Strength | Urban Industrial Landscape
    • The Scaffold
    • Industrial Pastorale: The Rural/Urban Landscape
    • Botanical Prints | The Natural World
    • Construction | Reconstruction : Urban Landscape
    • Infrastructure
  • Drawings
    • Pencil Drawings: Pandemic Pause
    • Drawings in Dust 1
    • Signs & Symbols (Archive)
    • Botanical Drawings (Archive)
  • Photography
    • New Work Inspired by England
    • Seattle Waterfront Park Photography
    • Architectural Photography | Construction Sites
    • American West Landscape Photography
  • Mixed Media
    • Modern Botanical | Mixed Media on Plaster
    • From the Sea | Water Paintings
    • Sleep Studies
  • Wabi Sabi Abstract
    • Minimalist Modern
    • Ink Painting Abstractions
  • Shop
    • The Water Tower Project
  • About
    • Contact
  • Blog

Contact

If you have comments or questions about my work please feel free to contact me via phone, email or the form on this page. To inquire on availability and price for specific piece, please note the artwork title in your message.

    Your Name (required)

    Your Email (required)

    Subject

    Your Message

    INSTAGRAM

    A metaphysical idea waiting to become a drawing. A A metaphysical idea waiting to become a drawing. All day I have been studying graphite, the most evanescent of mediums. Fragility. Once you break the egg, scatter the nest, leave the children without family on an abandoned beach, what then? 

I have spent the day drawing. In the background, which becomes foreground with one click, is the news of the rounding up of another thousand or so human beings by bounty hunters given a quota, thrown into concrete cages and disappeared because someone decided that America is no longer the home of the #huddledmasses.

The plaque on the Statue of Liberty says:

“Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Noem and Holman have not, apparently, run their hands over these words.

How do you continue making art at a time like this? You chase the metaphor. There is always a constant truth beneath the chaos.
    Media studies. Addition and subtraction. Media studies. Addition and subtraction.
    Somehow, between checking the news and the usual d Somehow, between checking the news and the usual distractions I managed to complete a drawing. Going back to the beginning: drawings in dust. 9.5 x 12” Charcoal powder, compressed charcoal, charcoal pencil on Moleskine. I feel peaceful for the first time in weeks.
    The train tracks that go along Golden Gardens and The train tracks that go along Golden Gardens and pause briefly at the locks create a rupture in the city landscape. When the trains go by, the roar and squeal is like a thousand wild animals let out of their cage, and the ducks in the pond at the edge of the park shudder and dive under the water. A little farther north at Carkeek there is someone every year who steps in front of the train and whoever witnesses that is never the same. 

Sometimes the cargo containers are filled with coal, uncovered, and I have been part of demonstrations, which included polar bears and Orcas, objecting to that. Now, as we are being asked to casually accept nuclear reactors on every block as the price of having artificial intelligence, coal and its simple visible dust might look a little more friendly. The train brings with it economics and politics and life and death and class and all the people on the beach are just trying to have a moment in the sun. And the boaters at the marina, if they have finished polishing and descaling and mending the sails are lying back with a guitar and getting lost in the mountains. If you are willing to live right next to the train tracks, you can pay a much lower price for your home, but your dreams will change. I have lived next to the train tracks when I was very, very small and every night I woke up screaming and ran across the floor in the beams of the streetlight looking for safety. I have woken up in a train yard on a bed of cardboard and gotten on the train in the dark. Only when you do that, do you know just how hard metal is.

I’ve been drawing recently from life and this study was done from a photograph. It drove me crazy trying to see details that I couldn’t really see and feel them with the pencil. I’ve abandoned the drawing for now, but I learned a great deal about perseverance and obliteration and re-perseverance. Also how machines pretend that they are perfectly symmetrical and are not. And when you don’t draw them with perfection, they look just plain wrong so you have to make them more perfect than they are, at least when they are in perspective.
    Tonight’s abandoned bird. The next one will be bet Tonight’s abandoned bird. The next one will be better. I’ve never tried to draw a Robin before. I’ve been obsessed with them since David Lynch sent them over to my childhood house, where they spent day and night getting drunk on the holly berries outside the kitchen window. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about google Laura Dern, Blue Velvet. And the Robin. It’s a hymnal to the good and the normal, done absolutely abnormally. I am learning all kinds of amazing things about how Robins build their nests. They start with mud. I did not know this. And in a drought, they will drag straw into a birdbath to get it wet and then drag the straw over a wormhole. Robins build their nests in the most unlikely places: drain spouts, highway overpasses, really bad motel parking lots. It’s kind of like how people find third place in community, even in the bleakest places. A franchise McDonald’s where people become regulars and always get the fries and just the fries because that’s all they can afford is a similar statement of naive valor: people talking to strangers and becoming known and taking shelter where they can. And if they leave a shredded napkin out there by their car, it will end up woven in with the straw and the leaves and the cigarette butts perched up there in the nest on the backside of the billboard.
    Waking up. Waking up.

    Contact Iskra

    Phone: (206) 367-2643
    Email: iskra(at)iskradesign.com

    PDF Resume

    Iskra Johnson, artist resume

    Let’s Connect

    • Contact Iskra
    • How to purchase artwork
    • Iskra Fine Art Blog : The creative process, conversations with artists, the contemplative impulse in art
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pinterest
    • Twitter

    All Images Copyright © 2026  Iskra Johnson · Site by LND · WordPress