Search Results for: transfer prints

New Abstract Minimalism, a Summer Subscriber Sale (And Some Thoughts On AI…)

August 23, 2023 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Duo (Yes/And) minimalist calligraphic art

Duo (Yes/And), one of the new minimalist prints just off the press and in my shop.

It was great to see old friends and new at the opening of Intersect at SAM Gallery. Thank you to all who came to the opening and also those who have gone at other times and sent me your lovely notes! The show continues Wednesday through Sunday 10-5 through the end of the day Sunday August 27.

The opportunity to talk about my work and explain my process at the gallery gave me a lot to think about. These last quiet days of August are a good time to reflect on what led me to work in this medium and to explain my “rules” for making the work. Also (in case you haven’t noticed!) Artificial Intelligence is making a lot of noise in the room and any artist, particularly an artist using digital technology, has to address the questions it raises.

[Read more…]

Collage Life, Refiguring Art and Friendship in the Pandemic

August 30, 2020 by Iskra 10 Comments

The Correspondent, ©Iskra Johnson

(This late summer dispatch breaks all the rules of “newsletter.” August is a time of slow thinking and revision, thought and word pasted and lifted and re-placed in an order based on considerate disorder and association, ie. on the structure of my mind. If there is no news (I have been immersed in art history which is by definition old news) there is still, however a “letter.” This post is about letter writing itself, and how personal correspondence can mean the world and re-make the world of our creative lives. Settle into a deep chair, with good light or a rustling tree and a cat at your feet. Consider that the post office would love it if you bought some stamps.)

On this particular morning, about 214 days since the pandemic became the official organizing principle, I am sitting at my kitchen table drinking Earl Grey and looking at a stack of books and magazines and letters accumulated since spring. In April my friend Jennifer began sending me her monthly Poetry subscriptions along with pages torn from magazines. Every page is pre-read and annotated with trenchant scribbles in the margins, curated personally just for me. Jennifer has reached the place in life of casting off. I am still bringing things into my house, desperate for distraction, but seem to have confused doom scrolling and pulp novels with The Great Books. I gather romances from the Little Free Libraries on my walks and have not made it beyond chapter 1.

When the first poetry letter arrived I was ecstatic. Mail! Brown paper and string! And delivered by a man in blue socks and shorts, as though it was 1958, a sandwich meant Mayonnaise on Wonder Bread, and Lassie the Collie still roamed the earth in his white socks, teaching us what heroes look like. The letters have ignited a connection that feels bigger than just the two of us, my friend and me sitting alone dangling face masks on our wrists in our separate homes. Over 20 years we have corresponded by email and post, with a dedication that is Victorian. When we compose a sentence to send to each other it is with the knowledge that we are writing, not just the tourist postcard’s “wish you were here,” but miniature novellas painting scenes or memories that cross space and time. We write to bring each other actually here, and we take great care. [Read more…]

The Art of Infrastructure

February 11, 2017 by Iskra 2 Comments

“For poets of the ordinary nothing has to be something else to be more than what it is.”— Anon

For People who Like Orange, industrial art print by Iskra — *For People Who Like Orange, Mixed media archival pigment print on paper or canvas, size variable up to 50″*

Contain. Hold. Spill. Accept. Refuse. ref-yoos. Dumpsters put a lid on what we can’t bear to keep or smell or look at any longer, and give us the illusion that our national sin of consumer indulgence is not squandered, but instead made noble through the absolution of waste management. All that discarded packaging is repackaged and sits neatly on the street in a box. Occasionally the lid lifts at a provocative angle and stays there, held by chains and wheels in suspension and possibility. Crows come. Lunch is foraged, toasters reclaimed, and on certain days of the week someone finds a discarded mattress and takes a nap. Dumpsters have their own oratory. Although more punk rock than symphony, every city gets a daily concert of metal on metal and smashing glass, the rumble of trucks, and the quieter transcripts of disenfranchisement and identity that take place at night, each one overwriting the other with a soft hiss and the percussive shake of the little ball in its can of paint. [Read more…]

Driving While Dreaming, Two Studies of the Alaska Way Viaduct

February 21, 2014 by Iskra Leave a Comment

I am hard at work on my series of prints about the Alaska Way Viaduct. Big Bertha, our sensitive and emotionally overwrought digging machine is helping me out by quitting on the job. We may have several extra years to contemplate incipient ruin, the subtleties of patina and the beauty of going nowhere.

This morning I started on a new collage with Pandora in the background set to my favorite station, which I am guilty, guilty, guilty of listening to instead of finding each song individually or listening to mixtapes made by friends 30+ years ago. The station, wouldn’t you know, is named for the father of music for airports Brian Eno. I do like this phrase from the Rolling Stone review of 1979, “...there’s a good deal of high craftsmanship here, but to find it, you’ve got to thwart the music’s intent by concentrating.” The trick of collage is often to concentrate while not concentrating, a sleight of hand through which something interesting may appear. Mr. Eno and his friends are the perfect soundtrack to encourage this state of mind.

As I was working, shifting layers back and forth and on and off and testing all the ways two simple images can converse and transform each other, I thought about driving and the visual emotional space of the car, which is so entirely married to music. I got my first and only car, a gray Toyota Corolla, in 1989. I will never take it for granted. The first time I sat on a lookout at sunset and turned on the radio I had a kind of American Satori experience: so this is what they were talking about! I get to sit here in my room on the street and just turn the dial and look out at the view?

The view of course is what the lovers of the viaduct will miss the most when it comes down. It is the last populist vista, where you don’t have to pay big dollars to see The Mountains and the Sound which make us want to live here. When it is gone we will have to buy a multi-million dollar penthouse condo or use binoculars to peer across the six to eight lanes of traffic they propose to go on top of the tunnel, which by then will cost 10 dollars per trip and which no one will use because who wants to drive in the dark?? Hmmm.

The music of this situation is both requiem and anthem, weaving its modal intervals in and out in lane changes and near-misses and ultimately onto the great offramp of what-it-is. Requiem for what is to be lost, anthem for what we can still see if we ditch our worries about gas and earthquakes and just go for a drive. I checked Pandora to see what lovely song was transporting me: “Ballad of Distances” from The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid, and “Requiem for a Dream” by the Kronos Quartet. Gotta love this many-splendored synchronistic modern life.

Ballad Of Distances 1, Transfer Print, 10″ x 10″, © Iskra Johnson

Ballad Of Distances Part 2, © Iskra Johnson

Stay tuned for details on my upcoming show, “Excavations,” at Zeitgeist, opening the first week of April.

Iskra Fine Art Upcoming Shows and Publications

January 6, 2013 by Iskra 1 Comment

I am starting the year with numerous shows all within the next three months. I will post reminders of openings here as they come up, but for those who want advance notice, here is the list of what’s up between now and April. I hope you will be able to stop by and see the work in person!

Prographica Fine Works on Paper: “The Bleak View”: I will have five prints and a drawing in this show. A perfect theme for this time of year in the Northwest, when you either find the loveliness in 100 shades of gray or die trying. The show runs from February 2-March 9, opening TBA.

The Elegant Scaffold Construction Site Photograph — “The Elegant Scaffold,” Photograph, 16″ x 16″, © Iskra Johnson

Bainbridge Arts & Crafts, on Bainbridge Island: “New Media: Digital Art”: I will have four pieces covering a range of botanical and industrial themed-work in this invitational exhibit. The show runs from March 20- April 22, opening reception April 5.

The Reeds Transfer Print — “The Reeds,” 1/2 ev, 22″ x 30″ paper size, 16″ x 21″ image size

Painters Under Pressure at Phinney Gallery: A group show with my print salon. The show runs from April 3-May 1, opening reception April 12 from 7-9 PM. I expect to have a variety of sizes and themes for this exhibit, possibly including new experimental typographic prints from The Wailing Wall. This will be our first group show in many years, and I am very excited about it. If you would like to keep up with PUPs do check out our Facebook page.

EXIT/NoExit, experimental typography — “EXIT/No Exit,” experimental typography, © Iskra Johnson

Additionally, SAM Gallery will have four of my new large prints from Construction/Reconstruction on display in February as part of the rotating collection. It has been exhilarating to see how scale changes the work, particularly when the themes are architecture and space.

In the world of publications, I am very excited to be in two books this year. Tom Hoffmann’s Watercolor Painting will have its official launch party at Gage Academy Friday January 18, 6-8 PM. In conjunction with the book signing the Steele Gallery at Gage will be exhibiting Tom Hoffmann’s work along with that of contributors to the book in “Watercolor: Thoughtfulness to Spontaneity.” I will have a piece on display from my series of expressive botanical paintings.

This past summer I explored the wildly inprovisational world of cyanotype, and an image from that series will be published in Jill Enfield’s upcoming “Jill Enfield’s Guide to Photographic Alternative Processes: Popular Historical and Contemporary Techniques” from Focal Press. I will post a link to the book when it is published, in June. You can read about my experience with cyanotype here, in the post “Three Days in the Sun….”

Because so many shows are happening in a short period of time I will send this summary out to those who are on my email mailing list as a separate newsletter, but suggest you follow me here at my blog or on the Iskra Fine Art Facebook page for updates and reminders. I will limit the number of individual event invites as I know people are overwhelmed by email these days.

Happy New Year, keep the creativity flowing!

New Abstract Minimalism, a Summer Subscriber Sale (And Some Thoughts On AI…)

Collage Life, Refiguring Art and Friendship in the Pandemic

The Art of Infrastructure

Driving While Dreaming, Two Studies of the Alaska Way Viaduct

Iskra Fine Art Upcoming Shows and Publications

Let’s Connect

Join Iskra’s Mailing List