contemplative art Archives

Pandemic Angel Art from Iskra

November 27, 2020 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Painter’s Angel (with Moon), © Iskra Fine Art

The Story of the Pandemic Angels

In September, the week of 9.11, I took a brief trip to Whidbey Island to escape the smoke from the California fires. For the first day the weather was balmy, with a perfectly clear blue summer sky. I wandered the beaches, filled my pockets with shells, and felt the euphoria of the traveler, a feeling I have missed acutely during the pandemic. Later that night the smoke came in. The horizon vanished, and whether to risk the outdoors became a calculation fraught with hazard. On my last day on the island, restless from being housebound, I went for a morning walk in nearby Woodsman cemetery. The air held a strange amber light, and pink smoke veiled the grave markers at the edge of the forest. I was captivated by the aura of the place, with its moss-covered headstones and weathered statuary dating from pioneer days. As I walked through the dry grass the angels seemed to emerge from the smoke like emissaries from another time. I began to study them and take their portraits.

I am a student of angels, and I had not seen these before. The faces of the little ones captured a blend of innocence and gravity that seemed both timeless and completely of our time. Beauty, grief, mourning, serenity, loss, longing for another time: the combined cataclysm of the fires and the pandemic require a vocabulary all its own. The phrase “smoke elegies” seemed to describe the mood in the air and the bigger moment. I decided then to do a series about the angels, (which got delayed by a journey to Tieton and the beginning of a photographic series of landscapes of the America West – but that’s another story!) Perhaps it is the coming of December, with its dark weather and mystic illuminations, but I woke up a few weeks ago possessed by the image of a winged statue. I decided to drop everything else on my plate and see where this body of work might go.

The archetype of the angel is far from my usual subject matter. Angels for many evoke religious associations, and as a result, for a contemporary artist it can feel precarious to go into this territory. For me angels do not represent religion, but instead act as a universal icon offering comfort, protection, rescue and transcendence. Their form is a devotional shape into which I can pour the unironic emotions of this time of isolation and worldwide loss. The pandemic has taken nearly 1.5 million lives world wide, and for many of those deaths there has been no ceremony of mourning, no bedside visitation, no funeral. A cemetery and the sense of ritual that accompanies it looks very different in the light of this new reality.

Homage to Faiyum, © Iskra Fine Art

Working on these images has been a contemplative and personally transformative process. The angels are built from a slow, painstaking method of collage that has led me on a path to rediscover what it was I saw in the smoke, at the edge of the woods. In the process I have researched the pictorial treatment of angels and marveled at the long fascination they have held for people through history, from ancient Crete to Victorian England all the way up to today’s video gamers in VR headsets. Some of these pieces reference the mourning theorems of American folk art, and others the shrouds of Faiyum. Others embrace Victorian intricacy and that era’s unabashed romance with sorrow. As I have been living with the faces of the angels I have also been living with history, and putting the present difficult moment into a deeper sense of time.

Pandemic Angel, ©Iskra Fine Art

Devotional practice often focuses on one image and repeats it again and again. In my years as a calligrapher and student of Buddhism I might do one character from the Heart Sutra for weeks. In that tradition, I have chosen only a few images, and worked with them in sequence, finding more to understand each time I look at subtle differences in color, texture and context. The result is a series of prints in variant editions. They are created through my unique process of digital assemblage, built up with layer upon layer of subtle surface and color from my photographs and ink painting. All of the prints are available in my shop, in a variety of sizes and prices. For the holiday season, everything in my shop is 20% off through January 2^nd with a minimum purchase.

The collection to date is included here, as the resolution for retina display on WordPress is best in the blog rather than the portfolios. Click on any image to be taken to the listing.

Blue Angel [Read more…]

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

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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

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