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
    • 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
  • About
    • Contact
  • Blog
You are here: Home / Archives for artist personal Moleskine sketchbook

Drawing in Hard Times: Occupying the News at My Kitchen Table

January 12, 2012 by Iskra

Drawing Flowers at my Kitchen Table

Back in the first January after the Crash of September 18, 2008, I was one of many who found themselves bewildered and petrified by the cascade of economic events beyond their control. I don’t need to go into personal details, (just google “auction rate securities + fraud+ retirement savings”) except to note that it did seem that all pillars of safety were falling, most especially the capitalist system — a system I had relied upon as a professional designer to put food on the table. By January I had spent four months archiving, updating, shaking the known trees, and banging my head on a small flat stone. With the phone-line to the capitalist world apparently dead I sat for many long hours at my kitchen table immobilized and staring into the abyss.

In this state I began to read newspapers with a grim scavenger obsession: what had fallen in the last hour? What was next? Who was suffering the most? And that is when I began to clip out the faces of bankers. Through no fault of their own they were all men. I began to draw them. Mr. Goldman Sachs, Mr. Arrested at 4 AM in his red sweatshirt, Mr. I Am Not Either Guilty. Oh, and one woman, Ms. Software Oligarch, in her perfect mannish Nehru shirt. I moved on to men shouting (mostly coaches) and men playing baseball. All this complicity, all this power and rage, captured in the sweet, soft, smudgy newsprint. At a certain point I couldn’t stand it anymore. I bought some tulips and turned the sketchbook around and started drawing petals and leaves, thinking, what will it be like when faces and flowers meet in the middle? And what is the masculine, and what is the feminine, what is this all about?

It was technically a wonderful exercise in how to use colored pencil, which I had never tried before. It was soothing, slow, patient work, perfectly suited to the intimate space of the kitchen. And emotionally it was revelatory. To shift from one subject to another, from livid anger to botanical grace over the course of the day, brought me a measure of equanimity. It also dealt with one of my favorite subjects in art, the Real and the Unreal. The ardent tulip was unequivocally real, the newspaper, not-so-much. Although I was using exactly the same materials for both there were subtle shifts in perception as the subject changed.

Revisiting the sketchbook in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street Movement I found a few other drawings I had forgotten: the innocents, the lost players, the embarrassingly earnest. It seems the theme of power and powerlessness, of crumbling security and tidal economic changes, of the need for refuge, are not going away anytime soon. For millions the world is far more shaky than it was in that first dreadful year after the crash.

Bank-Criminal-1

Mr.-I'm-Not-Guilty

TulipPencilDrawingWithColor

Tulip Leaves Colored Pencil Drawing

Shouting man sketch by Iskra

Coah shouting drawing by Iskra

Her Speller Number 45, drawing by Iskra THe Fan, colored pencil drawing by Iskra

The-Catcher Pencil Drawing in Moleskine

Of Flowers and Men. Selections from a personal sketchbook, colored pencil and lead pencil on Moleskine. (Click to enlarge.)

Filed Under: Drawing, Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals Tagged With: artist personal Moleskine sketchbook, colored pencil journal, drawing flowers in colored pencil, drawing from the newspaper, iskra moleskine journal, Portrait of a recession, portraits of Occupy Wallstreet

Join Iskra’s Mailing List

Don't miss a thing! Subscribe to receive show announcements, first peek at new work and my semi-monthly blog by email. I primarily use the blog for news and updates but by signing up you will also receive the occasional newsletter and special offers for items in my shop.

Iskra Fine Art Blog

the creative process | conversations with artists | the contemplative impulse in art

Instagram

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.

Featured Posts

  • How to Purchase Artwork from Iskra Fine Art
  • About This Blog
  • New Directions in Contemplative Art: Conversations with Artists
  • What is a Transfer Print? (Artist Statement)

Categories

  • Abstract Calligraphy
  • Architecture & Sense of Place
    • Construction/Reconstruction
    • The Alaska Way Viaduct
    • The Water Tower Project
  • Art Reviews
  • Artist Studio Visits
    • The Mystic Muse: Artists Working in the Contemplative Traditions
  • Botanical Art
    • Botanical Art Cards
  • Collage
    • Digital Collage
  • Commissioned Art
  • Drawing
  • Essays
    • Object Lessons: Essays and images inspired by "A History of the World in 100 Objects."
  • Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past
  • Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals
  • Living With Art
  • Meditation & Buddhism
  • Mixed Media
  • Painting
  • Photocollage
  • Photography
    • American West Landscape Photography
  • Prints
    • Transfer Prints
  • Social Media for Artists
    • The 100 Day Projects
  • The Garden
    • The Gardener's Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena
  • The Spiritual in Art
  • Travel
    • Road Trips
  • Uncategorized

Archives

Search

Connect on Facebook

Iskra Fine Art Facebook Page

Creative Inspiration

  • Alternative Photography
  • An Artist's Retreat
  • Anonymous Chinese Textile Genius: Moo Won
  • Chocolate Is A Verb
  • Contemplative Art Process: Danila Rumold
  • Eva Isaksen
  • Old Industrial Japan
  • The Altered Page
  • The Heart Sutra Loop
  • The Patra Passage

Galleries for Contemplative Art

  • ArtXchange Gallery
  • Seattle Asian Art Museum

Links

  • CollageArt.org
  • Iskra at SAM Gallery
  • Iskra Fine Art on Houzz
  • Seattle Art Museum Blog
  • Seattle Artist League
  • Seattle Print Arts
  • Seeing Fresh: Contemplative Photography
  • The Painter's Keys

What I'm Reading: Online Magazines and Books I Love

  • 16 mi.
  • Essays by David Whyte
  • Evening Will Come: Poetry
  • Hyperallergic
  • Painter's Table
  • Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art
  • Streetsy
  • The Original Van Gogh's Ear Anthology
  • Tricycle Magazine
  • Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty
  • Vanguard

Let’s Connect

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

Join Iskra’s Mailing List

Don't miss a thing! Subscribe to receive show announcements, first peek at new work and my semi-monthly blog by email. I primarily use the blog for news and updates but by signing up you will also receive the occasional newsletter and special offers for items in my shop.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

All Images Copyright © 2023  Iskra Johnson · Site by LND · WordPress