Iskra Fine Art

  • Prints
    • The Tarmac Residency: Airport Landscapes
    • Ink Painting Abstractions
    • 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
  • Journals
    • Wayfinding Journal (Archive)
  • Shop
  • About
    • Contact
  • Blog
You are here: Home / Archives for letters to my mother

Who is Your Muse?

December 30, 2018 by Iskra 1 Comment

Muse Mermaid by Iskra

“Letters . . . art’s sweet hooky.”– Lorrie Moore

“I admire your guts in the midst of strangers.”– Dawn Powell

When you make a painting or a drawing do you address it to someone, as you would a letter? And if you do, what does it mean, to “address?” There is the verb: the shout, murmur, scrawl, the beseeching wail and the twirling in circles trying to see what the paint won’t reveal. And there is the noun: the housing. That is where the Muse lives, if you believe in such things.

The origin of the word “address” is from the French, adrecier, “To go straight toward, straighten, set right, point, direct.” Yet the relationship with a Muse is anything but a straight line. It is an unpredictable courtship, a not-so-fair trade of creative work in return for the recognition of meaning. I have always needed a muse, and it has felt sometimes like a weakness, a quirk of sentiment that has gone out of fashion. Men get them, of course, but – women? They are supposed to be the Muse, right? Women are expected to get their ideas immaculately, from thin air, without the whispers of naked sylphs leaning in to their ears. Either that or they fall under the spell of Pygmalian, shaped and molded by the all-powerful man, and spend the rest of their lives giving him the credit.

You might think these are parodies, ancient points of view long discarded. But just leaf back a few years, to the 1950’s, or even, let’s get specific, to 1974. Until that year, only 44 years ago, a woman could not get her own credit card without her husband’s signature. That woman would be my mother, who confronted this reality in her diary as she considered divorce in the 1970’s.

This month I have been helping my mother sort her historical archives and personal papers. It has been a dizzying trip back in time, excavating the corners of her 1910 pink Victorian. Stacked under the stair of a closet we found a dozen forgotten boxes of history. As we opened them we discovered, interspersed with manifestos and personal letters, early issues of MS, Lilith, Off Our Backs, and Pandora, among countless quarterlies and pamphlets about every imaginable movement for social justice. My mother has been a life-long writer and journalist, and a passionate advocate for feminism. In her prolific archives I can trace the path from compliant goddess to bohemian to a woman on the front lines of women’s liberation. I can see how raw and how recent the past is. I can see how hard-won and personal the journey has been, and how important the act of writing letters and journals is in living history and being conscious that you are living it.

These boxes of paper have dusty, pungent physical presence. The smell of old and well-traveled paper is like no other. If you throw out a remnant of this vintage without looking, it will come looking for you later and crumple you in its fist. So you look. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Spiritual in Art Tagged With: artist inspiration, Artist Muse, ken nordine, letters to my mother, The Muse, Who is your Muse?

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’ve written a wild-mind sort of blog post in wh I’ve written a wild-mind sort of blog post in which I let the story of place, museums, witness and culture unfold as it wishes. It’s an old-style post before I had “newsletter consciousness.” (Sigh….when you send out a post with one image and a show announcement and maybe five more words and someone writes, “perfect length to view on my phone” you may be tempted to perform more of the same and forget the original muse, born long before success was judged by how well thoughts fit within 2x5” square inches. A few excerpts here and first link in bio to read the entirety. Witness and elegy is where I seem to live. Painting is acrylic ink on panel, a piece I have yet to resolve but like to see into for the next step.
If you are born on 9.11 take back this day. It’s If you are born on 9.11 take back this day. It’s still yours! Yesterday I started early and went to an island in the middle of the blue sea to be in beauty and celebrate life. As we walked the beach we met a young boy also born on 9.11. His parents had brought him to Vashon for the same reason, and he had found a perfect moon shell for his own birthday present sent from the sea. It was such a lovely moment, to remember the world is young no matter how old we are.
Taking the last golden days of summer for study. T Taking the last golden days of summer for study. The Volunteer Park museum has an exhibit showing the influence of the Edo arts in Japan on Toulouse-Lautrec and I went to see it last weekend. As you can see from these images, I seem to have no interest in Lautrec— True! But these details of woodcuts and paintings on silk fill me with a quiet rapture.
Walking Meditation Walking Meditation
RIP Brian McBride, The Stars of the Lid RIP Brian McBride, The Stars of the Lid
Sunday Morning Meditation: River and woods, stone Sunday Morning Meditation: River and woods, stone and light.

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
  • Airport Landscapes
  • Architecture & Sense of Place
  • Art Reviews
  • Art Sales
  • Artist Studio Visits
    • The Mystic Muse: Artists Working in the Contemplative Traditions
  • botanical art
  • Botanical Art Cards
  • Collage
  • Construction/Reconstruction
  • Digital Collage
  • Drawing
  • Essays
  • Featured Post
  • Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past
  • Iskra Sketchbooks & Journals
  • Iskra Writing on Medium
  • Living With Art
  • Meditation & Buddhism
  • Mixed Media
  • Music
  • Object Lessons: Essays and images inspired by "A History of the World in 100 Objects."
  • Painting
  • Photocollage
  • Photography
    • American West Landscape Photography
  • Poems
  • Print Sale
  • Prints
  • Recent Posts
  • Road Trips
  • Social Media for Artists
  • The 100 Day Projects
  • The Alaska Way Viaduct
  • The Garden
  • The Gardener's Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena
  • The Spiritual in Art
  • The Street
  • the Tarmac Residency
  • The Water Tower Project
  • Transfer Prints
  • Travel
  • Uncategorized
  • Watercolors

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