contemplative art — Iskra Fine Art

Winter Walk | New Year’s Greetings from Iskra

January 1, 2020 by Iskra 2 Comments

Winter Walk Print by Iskra — “Winter Walk,” limited edition print © Iskra Johnson

Greetings in the new year! As I write this the rain has lifted in spite of the emoticon insisting otherwise on my phone. Outside the studio window the trees are shimmering, in delicate shades of umber and sap. I will be going for my New Year’s walk soon, but I want first to send out this letter of thanks to friends and collectors for your support of my work over this past year. Although my attention was often elsewhere, preoccupied with family and personal loss, this turned out to be the best year I have ever had in art. I have never felt more grateful for the opportunities of this path, and am filling notebooks with new ideas that keep me up until the wee hours.

The new year brings some shifts in focus and refinements of direction. Although I will continue to do prints, in multiple ongoing themes ranging from natural landscapes to architecture and industry, I am also returning to drawing and the roots of contemplative art. For much of my life calligraphy was my daily practice and also my livelihood. The practice of 26 simple forms kept me clear and laser focused: it is not possible to do calligraphy without being in the moment. Photography is also an art of the moment, and of awareness, but with the introduction of digital methods and the printmaking processes it is also mind-bendingly technical. One can very quickly forget to breathe, and accordingly shut off the pathways to seeing that come only through working directly with one’s hands.

Last month I officially retired from my career in design to focus full time on art. Letters will continue to appear, but in new forms, not as corporate identities or book titles, but as visual art and as essays. Honoring the path I took in lettering and all that it taught me, I have returned to the morning practices of handwriting and drawing as meditation, which opens up a whole new-old world of contour, shape, representation, chiaroscuro. I am sharing my process on Instagram and find the community there to be wonderfully supportive (including in bringing me new tools, like the marvelous 3-point ball point pen from renowned artist Nicolas Sanchez.) Instagram is my laboratory for bringing worlds together: narrative, poetry, photography, community and contemplation. From the act of making process visible my work takes leaps it would not think of in the privacy of my own studio.

Concentration drawing of a moon shell by Iskra

So it turns out ballpoint pen was just a starter drug to pencil. I have never been able to draw happily with a pencil and suddenly here it is and I love it, thank you hb graphite and mornings listening to jazz to keep the thinking mind quiet. To draw is to find the horizon. A shell is a vast landscape with one curved edge and beyond it is the sea and the sun and the moon. To draw a moon shell is to sneak up on it. I always love best the white space and for me I go on tiptoes with very soft feet before committing to the form.

If you are used to seeing architecture here and wondering about consistency, don’t for one minute be fooled…. A shell is a house by any other name.

My limited edition prints can be seen in a beautiful ongoing display now at Museo Gallery on Whidbey Island, and in a new venture out of Paris that I will share more about as it develops. I am offering a range of new prints in my shop available to browse online or in studio visits. The two forest images here are from a series based on winter walks. I love taking digital methods and transforming them through a classic aesthetic. I approach the making of a digital photographic print as I used to approach darkroom printing, dodging and burning, proofing, squinting, and always keeping in the foreground a sense of printerlyness and paper. The forest series is a vestige of an older world, when there were Currier and Ives plates lined up on the mantel, and the forest was eternal. This series, like the Traveler’s Suite, is intimate scale, 12 x 16 on a 17 x 22 sheet.

I wish you a beautiful beginning to the new decade. May the weather emoticon work with us more often than not, and bring at least as much light as dark. And may we all look up and see the sky.

Forest Grove Fine Art Print by iskra — “Forest Grove” limited edition archival pigment print © Iskra Johnson

Follow me on Facebook and on Instagram

About This Blog

May 7, 2017 by Iskra 2 Comments

With wild mind, you live with the whole sky. It’s very different from the idea of a muse, which is something outside yourself that appears and magically helps you.–Natalie Goldberg

I am a multi-disciplinary artist, and I find that writing and image making are part of the same river, equal currents flowing between each other in the creative process. Words and images flood seemingly randomly through my life and land on the blackboard, in notebooks and pressed on the very dense altar of the refrigerator door, waiting for the organizing principle to emerge. [Read more…]

Taking Refuge: An Evening at the Seattle Asian Art Museum

March 25, 2015 by Iskra Leave a Comment

“Thus we live in a world that first existed inside the heads of others, a world built up through innumerable sustained acts of intentionality, a world where everything speaks not of nature and her processes but of its makers in their resistance to those processes. In a very real sense we can be described as living inside the heads of others, in an excess of interiority that obliterates our own relation to material origins, to biologies, to our bodies. In some way, making was intended to override the givens of nature, to create a world; that world has itself become a given whose terms are more limited in their scope for imagination and act. The world is so thoroughly made it calls for no more making, but for breaching its walls and tracing its processes to their origins. “Taking apart” has become the primary metaphor and “backward” the most significant direction: the creative act becomes an unraveling, recouping the old rather than augmenting the new. ” –Rebecca Solnit

Seattle’s Asian Art Museum sits in a stately Art Deco building nestled among trees in Volunteer Park. Known for its extensive collection of [Read more…]

Marking Time: Tracy Simpson and the Contemplative Art of Potato Printing

April 17, 2013 by Iskra 6 Comments

May Days Tracy Simpson — “May Days,” 18.5″ x 26″, Potato Print, Tracy Simpson

I have been looking for an opportunity to interview Tracy Simpson about her extraordinary potato print “calendars” for quite a while. As a member of the six-person print arts salon Painters Under Pressure, I have watched her work grow and evolve over the course of a decade. Just after opening our current salon exhibit at Phinney Gallery we had the time to sit down at length and talk about her process. What follows is a combination of conversation and correspondence.

From the beginning I have seen connections between your work and that of John Cage. Cage’s work evolved to be the product and process of impersonal systems of chance. This is one way in which he expressed his own sense of spirituality or “zen”: as a path of divorcing his work from the normal sense of self and identification of self with personal preference and personal history. Did this lead to automatism? Coldness? Abstraction only? Hard to say. His music can be aggressively difficult to listen to. But what always comes through to me in his writing, his visual art and his persona is not the automatic or the “no-self,” but a sense of empathy and embrace. There is a kindness in letting go of the personal identification with making art. It can be liberating.

Also, Cage’s work in music is all about time, and not-time, noise and not-noise. In marking time with the structure of a calendar you are indirectly noting its absence and its impending endings. Every month ends on a note, so to speak. The grid structure is not unlike a musical structure, a grid/signature/score with notation. The calendar is scoring the month, even as you physically score the paper. I am interested in how you have chosen a very impersonal structure, the eternal unchanging numbers and grid of the calendar and made it your system. Can you talk about that, about what is impersonal and what is not?

Seven Planets Tracy Simpson potato print — “Seven Planets,” 18″ x 24″, potato print © Tracy Simpson

You are right that time is about as impersonal as it gets; time stops for no one, it’s inexorable. And while we may individually have the sense now and again that time is standing still or speeds up for a bit, we know both are illusions or tricks of attention. You are also right that the way time is traditionally organized in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and so on, is impersonal. We really don’t get to say hey, I think I’ll step out of time in general or, I’m tired of how we collectively organize time and, really, my way is better so I’ll do that for awhile. For the most part, to exist in the world along with everyone else, we have to surrender to how our particular culture relates to time. So yes, in our culture there is a very set, impersonal structure that developed a long time ago that is partly related to the sun rising and setting and how the moon travels around the planet and partly related to what the collective consciously or unconsciously decided works.

I do like thinking about all that, stepping back and considering what is “natural” in terms of how we as humans relate to time and what we have constructed or imposed for convenience. And what I find even more interesting is how we interact with time. Not only is time the context in which everything happens for us as individuals and for us collectively, but I think there is nothing more personal than how we confront the inevitability of time passing whether it is during a given day or over the uncertain length of a lifetime. What has evolved for me with my art is an ongoing conversation about how I relate to time, its passage, anniversaries, the future, its apparent infinity and my obvious finiteness, how a moment in the morning may color another moment in the afternoon, how a moment in the evening may color my memory of a moment in the morning.

January Bamboo Tracy Simpson potato print — “January Bamboo,” 18″ x 26″, potato print, © Tracy Simpson

[Read more…]

New Directions in Contemplative Art: Conversations with Artists

October 13, 2012 by Iskra 2 Comments

Iconography_Drawing — “Help Along the Way” Mixed Media Drawing, © Iskra Johnson

This week I am launching a new series of occasional interviews with artists working in the contemplative/devotional traditions. Many of these artists work within the rich iconography of Buddhism, and specifically with the image of the Buddha. Historically the Buddha is represented as a figure of serene composure, elegance and grace. The eyes look inward, closed or downward cast, the shoulders curve gently into hands held in perfect mudra. A careful ritualized mathematics guides the distance between folds in the Buddha’s robes and the size and placement of snails on his head. The surface is stone-hard or wood, impenetrable.

This is a statue, not a man–and certainly not a woman, although Greek influence gives his robes a lyrical sweep and his body is not the emaciated one of early more ascetic representations. Not just the province of practicing “Buddhists,” the Buddha image lives ubiquitously in the contemporary marketplace of imagery and ideas. The popular shorthand for “Buddhism” is the relinquishment of desire and a state of serene acceptance, exemplified by the immobile statue. The statue is an ideal. What happens when society fills its spiritual landscape with an image of an ideal rather than a real?

It sets up a struggle, a dichotomy, hazardous and blessed in equal measure. The essence of devotional art is an image and an ideal larger than the human capacity to realize. It is aspirational. And in aspiration is a keen and particular form of suffering: you never get there, you are always leaning towards, but never reaching. Modern life, at least as practiced in America, is about getting there: and it is about getting. There is grasping and a kind of avarice in that. As well, a valuable practical truth and wisdom. The democratic revolutions tumbled the monarchies: we can all consider ourselves kings, queens, or at least the head of our local precinct caucus. Darwin, driving a nail into holy hierarchies, established that we might be on a less than mystical trajectory from birth to death and nowhere does he tell us if the soul is an acquired or inherited trait. Given the melting ice caps we don’t know if we or the sutras will be here in 2020. It is only logical to say: why not now? Why not me? Why can’t I understand in my own terms, and right now, — quickly?

The membrane between the modern urgency to leap efficiently from aspiration to getting and a deeper, timeless and more thoughtful understanding is being explored by the artists, writers and other creators reinventing religious iconography on their own terms. Some of them continue in the lineage of traditional forms, repositioning them in modern environments. Others take the sly point of view, working in illustration and advertising, and others work from the ground up re-inventing the very iconographic forms, with their own personal and aesthetic mathematics. Irony is rare, and to me this is a welcome blessing. These artists are not afraid to wear their aspiration on their sleeve. They may risk condescension and accusations of blasphemy from the spiritual establishments, and incomprehension from the secular consumer, and yet they continue on.

As someone who has followed the Buddhist path– with some detours– for most of my adult life, I want to talk to these people. The Buddha image in particular has huge resonance for me. I have done and continue to do visual art, or what I think of more properly as contemplative practice, that incorporates the image of the Buddha. This practice has led me towards viewing my own art making, regardless of the subject, as an extension of contemplation, primarily motivated by a desire for insight, beauty and emotional ballast, and secondarily as an object in the marketplace. I look forward to visiting the studios and work of artists with a similar perspective, and to seeing the varieties of ways in which their practice takes form.

Please check back from time to see the latest artists interviewed in the category of “The Mystic Muse“, or subscribe to receive this blog in your mailbox.

My companion in travels, the plug-in-‘88 Toyota-cigarette-lighter-laughing-while-driving-Buddha. Factory made in a high-stress environment by card-carrying atheists, no doubt.

Winter Walk | New Year’s Greetings from Iskra

About This Blog

Taking Refuge: An Evening at the Seattle Asian Art Museum

Marking Time: Tracy Simpson and the Contemplative Art of Potato Printing

New Directions in Contemplative Art: Conversations with Artists

Let’s Connect

Join Iskra’s Mailing List