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You are here: Home / Collage / Elusionary Landscapes: New Drawings and Collages from the Rural Heartlands

Elusionary Landscapes: New Drawings and Collages from the Rural Heartlands

September 29, 2022 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Symmetries Interrupted a barn collage landscape
Symmetries Interrupted, limited edition archival print from original photography and painting ©Iskra Johnson Available here

An entire season has passed since I last posted here. It has been a long sun-filled summer filled with concentrated studio time and a pivotal week spent in Eastern Washington in the long awaited Tieton Residency. A dear friend moved to Tieton in Eastern Washington two years ago, with the intention of creating a residency in her farmhouse for visiting artists and writers. The pandemic intervened and the residency did not happen for two years – until this August! I had the farmhouse, the upstairs studio, and the landscape to myself during the day, with hours to wander, photograph and draw. It was an unforgettable time of slow communion with my pencil and camera, with evenings spent in good company getting to know the Yakima Valley in new ways with my hosts. 

Drawing in situ, a skill I had forgotten, and a way of being that feels like home.
Yakima Valley Cuisine Scene
Yakima Valley Cuisine Scene, local, fresh, innovative. Top row, two very different approaches to the idea of soup; below, the wildly wonderful counter at Crafted, with chef-owner Dan Kokomo keeping his charm and his cool on a busy Saturday night.

The White Barn, landscape photography by Iskra

The farmhouse is situated on a road with a front row seat to sunrises and sunsets over the orchard valley. The muse of the property is The White Barn, which I have taken roughly a hundred photographs of (and which is available as part of an ongoing portfolio of Western Photography.) The architecture on the immediate property was my primary focus during the residency, with road trips to document alternate forms of my favorite structure, The Shed, in its native habitat. During this time I used drawing to sharpen my concentration, and apps like SnapSeed to experiment with new ways of combining digital and drawn imagery, which became final works in the studio once I got home.

The sprinkler, in evening attenuated structure in the field drawing by Iskra Barns and sheds pencil drawing by Iskra

Apple industry elegy pencil drawing

One morning I heard a loud roaring in the orchard on the hill. Awhile later a parade of rigs hauling pesticides passed in front of the window. The men driving wore white moon suits and drove under the shelter of canopies covered with a filigree of cut cans to ward off birds. In this piece I combined a drawing of the man with a botanical drawing of apples I did earlier this year. Agriculture is complicated. There is arsenic in the seeds of apples. There was arsenic in the pesticides that nearly killed me years ago. After running through freshly sprayed fields as a child one of my hosts spent a month in the hospital. Those who make their living in the fields hold their breath for a lifetime, waiting to see if they make it to 40.

Back Road Glimpse
Photography printed onto vintage stationary and then painted (one of one.) 8.5 x 11 © Iskra Johnson

Once home I began to work with the idea of the word “terroir” in different ways. Right now that word seems to encompass so much: the textures of earth and rust and weather that have always filled my work, the beauty and sensuality of the food culture I experienced in Yakima county, the sense of urgency that comes to the garden when your water bill is almost $500 and you still lose trees in unprecedented drought. “Terroir” comes originally from the French, and is a term that describes the meeting of wine and earth, the hard to translate sense of place that defines a wine. It is a particularly poignant word to consider, as olives and wine both teeter on a precipice in a changing climate.

Out of this exploration of terroir I have been making new collages, using hand-painted papers and photography. There is also a new series of cards, “Elusionary Landscapes: Back Roads of Rural America.”  These pieces are influenced by my interest in vintage papers and letters, first sparked early in the pandemic by a visit to a vintage ephemera store. Ruffling through a phone book of Seattle 1947 I stepped backwards in time and I have never been the same since. All three cards are available as prints in larger sizes. Click any image to see details or purchase.

Illusionary Landscapes, Back roads of Rural America

Tennessee Stories, from Illusionary Landscapes, Back Roads of Rural America
Tennessee Stories, inspired by a roadtrip in the spring to Appalachia
Wind Wheel, from Illusionary Landscapes, Back roads of Rural America
Wind Wheel
Letter from the Field

Mixing media is a kind of cross training for an artist, and each time I return to drawing and painting my digital collage and photography changes. When I do photo collage now I sometimes feel little difference from the act of drawing, and it changes the feeling of the pieces. 

Postcard from the West, mixed media collage
Postcard from the West, © Iskra Johnson. Available as a limited edition here.
After the Storm
Before the Storm, available as a limited edition print © Iskra Johnson. Available here.
The Starry Night, original collage, one of one
The Starry Night, original collage with hand painted and inscribed papers, 8.5 x 11. Inquire.

The last piece here came out of another kind of landscape, Whidbey Island. This September I visited friends there who are building a house on a hill. As we walked through the construction site my friend talked about the shape and size of each window, and how the view with no frame is not a “view,” but with just the right framing the unorganized mass of nature and land becomes “more itself.” Mondrian walked this territory with his trees interrupted by geometry. The invention of the “Claude Glass” in 1775 helped to enshrine the practice of framing landscape and the idea of “The Picturesque” for painters and poets from the mid 18th century on. This piece, “They Built the House So They Could See the Moon,” is an homage to the visionaries and the builders. It is on its way to “Orbiting Missfits” at the New Moon Gallery in Spokane opening in October.

Moon House Collage

 

Stay in touch, and follow me on Instagram to see my studio process and to see more of this creative summer and new work ahead!

 

Filed Under: Botanical Art Cards, Collage, Drawing, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals Tagged With: Elusionary Landscape, Iskra Landscape drawing, Landscape collage, landscape collage cards, terroir, Tieton Residency, yakima food scene

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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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