collage life Archives - Iskra Fine Art

In Memoriam: Richard Kehl, Artist, Scout, Eternal Inspiration

August 30, 2026 by Iskra Leave a Comment

In the Dream I was holding On the parachute collage — *In the Dream I was holding on, For Richey Kehl ©Iskra Johnson*

A year ago today Richard Kehl left the earth. It was unexpected. Earlier in the week he had sent me an email with a treasure chest of collage images, but including a rare picture of himself, looking at the camera as though directly into the storm, the cosmos, the self, the i/thou of human connection— as well as a portrait of his beloved. One has to wonder if he had a premonition. He included two sentences about presence, and art and love, and I carry them with me like amulets in moments of doubt.

This week I have been haunted by loss, companioned by the parachute we are sometimes offered by those who see into us, and know what we need. I had studied with Richey at the University of Washington when I was getting my BFA in painting. He was universally the teacher most likely to inspire this one-sentence review: Richey Kehl saved me!

He was the one who saw into each student and asked them to step into themselves, not to copy someone else, not to get an A, not to be fawned over with praise, but to go forth. And yes, I was one of those would would say, “he saved me.” I still have the visual notebook he required we keep and add to each day, and it still contains my DNA. The pages are burnt with the acid of time and wood pulp, the magazine photos have the unmistakable tint of bad color separations that Adobe now tries to sell us as vintage filters on an annual subscription.

And I am still the gambler’s daughter.

It was not until I re-met Richey in 2012 and visited his studio that I became acquainted with the idea of “Scout.” Over a decade later the idea continues to gather resonance. The essential solitude that I have experienced as an artist and a seeker often feels suspect: why don’t you have grandchildren? Why aren’t you at a party? Why are you taking pictures of some broken down dumpster or the bleached grass and bramble ridge of Kite Hill when there is neither wind nor kites?

If you are a Scout you brush the questions off. Your job is to be on the ridge, peering through the duck blind, catching the meteor, questioning the agate, or parsing the ordinary with a tuning fork and making conversation that leaves your companions either laughing or unforgettably puzzled.

It is comforting, this idea of the Scout. We are alone, but not alone, because to be a Scout is to be part of The Scouts— there are others out there.

*Scout on the Blue Beach, ©Iskra Johnson*

Richey, you are so loved, and not forgotten.

xox,

all of us

Mixed Media Adventures: A Process Journal from Iskra Fine Art

April 16, 2021 by Iskra 4 Comments

Vintage Life Woman Iskra Collage — *Vintage Life: The Ever-Present Past Perfect Tense*

It has been a full season since I last wrote here. I dimly remember a dark winter, (are my socks still damp?) with sunlight rationed as though WW2 never ended. Right now, mid April and 70 degrees, we have an armistice: the bamboo is incandescent in sunlight above the pond and the towhee is singing his one song which is “towhee, towhee.” Annoying, but reassuring, as the song means “here I am, being myself, as usual, and by the way thankyou for not over-pruning the laurel hotel because we really like that leafy wallpaper. Is it British?”

What a relief! We got here! Eggs are being made and laid, the vaccine is working, and someone came for a toasted bagel in my kitchen today: we ate it unmasked, with butter! (I don’t know if it is possible to put too many exclamation points after the buttered toast….)

The little very small things make me very happy. 12 months of pandemic have wrought changes. I have found myself gravitating to the size of the page, an intimate space where art is not performance, but conversation: The missing intimacy of whispers and histories traded and notated in the margins; old books, primers, notions catalogs from St. Louis, 1923, the Seattle Telephone book 1947.

Vintage Phone Book Seattle — *When every number started with a letter*

In this year the present has seemed indefinitely suspended, and I’ve been going back in time. One restless afternoon I stumbled onto one of Seattle’s last antique stores, soon to be leveled for condos, and began documenting it with my camera. Somehow, in the act of filming a book’s pages as I turned them, words lifted from the page and became sound. On my last visit there I came home with “back issues” of newspapers from 1924 and 1915. Now in the morning I sit at the kitchen table and pour over the recital reviews and petulant letters from second chair violinists in Musical America. I find myself absurdly thrilled that Wadsworth Provandie’s debut in a production of The New Life got a “rousing ovation and he sang twice.” I learn the proper techniques of canoeing in a skirt, on The Girls’ Page in The Youth’s Companion. Reading these frayed bits of history gives me perspective. We may complain about social media censorship, but it took Machiavellian footwork to get the parts for Mahler’s 8^th past the cablegram censors before WWI. Imagine an orchestra performance being held up for a year because “the parts were in Europe.” [Read more…]

Collage Life, Refiguring Art and Friendship in the Pandemic

August 30, 2020 by Iskra 10 Comments

(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…]

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