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The Poppies are the Last to Go

November 8, 2010 by Iskra Leave a Comment

How Many Minutes from Yesterday: Garden, Early November © Iskra Johnson

Filed Under: Photography, The Garden Tagged With: Garden Buddha, garden in Autumn, Seattle artist Garden, yellow poppies

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Moving up from postage stamps to postcards! What i

Moving up from postage stamps to postcards! What is it about scale, distance and intimacy? How do you paint “distance”? Years ago a long-time beau said to me: “the key to a successful relationship depends on maintaining the right distance.” Some would walk away right then, thinking, “don’t they have this backwards?” On the other hand, if you grew up shuttling between homes, your nose pressed to the glass of a speeding car, trying to distinguish from the blur of brown and gray the familiars of “river” “cattail” and “barn”; if, on these weekend visits the driver was farther away in the front seat of the car than when separated by 60 miles, it might make perfect sense, the right distance, and you would say “sure,” and think again and again, for years of visitations and partings, “please go away so I can write to you.”

First Skagit driveby, on the lovely Carnet de Voyage travel book, from Arches. Raw umber, cad yellow medium, Prussian blue, yellow iron oxide transparent.

Friday night: the world has a new equator: on one

Friday night: the world has a new equator: on one side are those who “read the news” and on the other are those who are miraculously focused on the pizza just ordered, the stock price not yet imploded, the watering can and the geranium: an idea of continuity that is so deep it supersedes privacy settings or the need for them.
It’s Friday night here, as I said, in that other world among those who do read the news. We notice that the US postal service is up next for dismemberment (#unkind) and that Etsy (artists! Shops! Shipping!) will be so over by March. We notice the curious dismissal of the military (#nonessential), we think about patriotism and flags (#soover) and find it hard to breathe.

This is when, weirdly, the Washington Post comes to the rescue with not, “art criticism”, but with a portal to history, meaning, and the desperately needed smelling salts of the Romantic Era. Portals to an alternate view much needed here:)) Also: (if you trust the FAA,) who wants to fly to NYC for a weekend to see the Met?

Tonight, after absorbing so much news of the coup

Tonight, after absorbing so much news of the coup (the postal service is being deleted— goodbye Etsy🥲) I am taking time to be in time with stacks of books on painting. The first page is a beautiful quote of process notes from @RebeccaCrowell from her mesmerizing book on cold wax medium. (The paintings are mine.) @stephanie.dalton.cowan introduced me to this wonderful world of surface intrigue and pigment subtleties, layers and layers of trial, error, intention, erasure and obfuscation. I cannot work in this medium due to its toxicity, but I cross train, learning what I can apply with acrylic and water. The work is so moody, and pigmented and rich. Hello Etruscans, now I begin to understand the art of the #fayumportraits. What I love about the quote from Rebecca is the embrace of the revisions. Pentimento, mystery, depth— it’s entirely the art of revision. Understood as a dance between doubt, acceptance and equilibrium. I painted 40 postage stamp landscapes today. An exercise in memory, scale and phenomena. The land is large, the window is small. Mail it, while there is still a postal service. . .
Can you imagine a United States without stamps, envelopes, mailboxes or #themail???

Creation Myths: they said everything was done in s

Creation Myths: they said everything was done in seven days. It must have been a very long day to mix all the colors. At this point, the telephone pole had not even been invented, much less the car, the fender or the particular kind of mud that sprays up from the road, tinted with rubber particulates and the rainbow leakage of fossil fuels. There would have first been the color of the original, and then the color of the fossil— and so many eons in between! How many hours do you suppose were spent looking up at a sky, deciding it was too blue and adding white for clouds, darkening the clouds with rain, inventing chandeliers and the prisms they cast and then puzzling over exactly how do you paint a rainbow? My daily practice involves long journeys in search of the colors, and every day the world looks different as I see more. Today I have an assignation with the goddess Phthalo. She wears velvet kimonos and walks along the edges of ponds. You can see her at dusk and in early morning.

Some painting notes: to keep my psychic sanity at

Some painting notes: to keep my psychic sanity at night I am watching as much of The Crown as I can before my eyes give out at midnight. Going back to England anytime in the last hundred years seems like a vacation, compared to the mess of the country formerly known as the USA, now being disassembled and sold off for parts. Bonus points, the scene with Winston Churchill and Graham Sutherland when Sutherland paints Churchill‘s portrait and they discuss art and trauma and the nature of what it is to be alive and witness oneself change through loss. Perhaps one of the most profound and original moments in contemporary drama. Also, an unexpected painting lesson from Churchill.

I have pulled out my many postcards gathered at Kettles Yard and the Tate, and I’m thinking about the murky, muddy tempera surfaces of the 40s and 50s and how they echo the low-contrast evening light in eastern Washington as well as the interior ambiance of a British drawing room at dusk, before someone turns on the chandeliers. On my journeys with a dear friend through the landscapes of Tieton and Naches I was always fascinated by what I call “the attenuated structure in the field.” As a photographic artist, I am now banging my head against my palette, taking the first steps to acknowledge that I have no idea how to paint what I see in paint rather than with photography.

In the end, it is always human limitation, and the paint itself, that has the last word. I now wish I had stopped and not filled in the roof. The paint had created a lightless, dim, low contrast environment, in which the structure was theoretical, not real. The photograph said the roof was dark and the light dimensional. But after multiple color and value trials, each painted over, I couldn’t find it. Don’t you hate that moment, when you don’t know “what color goes here???” Churchill agrees on this. I should have left the roof transparent.

Glimpses from the studio.

Glimpses from the studio.

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