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You are here: Home / Archives for mixed media drawing

Drawing. Remembering, Studying. Thank you Michael Graves.

September 3, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Today I am cleaning up my studio and preparing to draw. Ok if I say that, I really will put the stacks of odd-shaped ideas away and neatly label them as “Misc.” (Or the dreaded “Sub-divisions of Misc.”) I will clear five square feet of table and find some hiding place for what was on the tables and be able to walk through the room waving my hands freely. Maybe I will find that lost scrap of paper under the thumb-tacked clippings from a year ago that says something wise.

Meanwhile, one last hour of procrastination on the porch (in the sun) (with hummingbirds) led to a wonderful article in the New York Sunday Times on “Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing.” Thank you Michael Graves for making me want to get up in the middle of this beautiful Labor Day afternoon and go to work.

“…But can the value of drawing be simply that of a collector’s artifact or a pretty picture? No. I have a real purpose in making each drawing, either to remember something or to study something. Each one is part of a process and not an end in itself. I’m personally fascinated not just by what architects choose to draw but also by what they choose not to draw.”

I did this piece to remember what it is to lose someone, and to know, to study, the shape of that feeling completely. You are in between water and shore. An anchor would be in some other kind of drawing.

 

Adrift_mixed media drawing
Adrift, powdered pigment and graphite on paper, © Iskra Johnson

 

I believe that scrap of paper said something about boats, about how “one’s life is the project of building the boat. At times there are no oars, until you make those too.” Good to recall this from a fine moment on a sunny day when the tools for construction seem well at hand.

 

Filed Under: Drawing Tagged With: adrift, boat drawing, drawings about emotional states, graphite and powdered pigment drawing, Michael Graves on drawing, mixed media drawing

Architectural Studies: Drawing in Four Colors with an Idea in Mind

June 26, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Containment 2 Mixed Media Drawing
© Iskra Johnson

Filed Under: Drawing Tagged With: house drawings, mixed media drawing

The Beloved Cosmos

April 14, 2010 by Iskra Leave a Comment

cosmos and bee drawing by Iskra
The Beloved Cosmos. Mixed media drawing © Iskra Johnson

The Cosmos is your basic “how to draw a flower-flower” with an upgrade. It has the round dot in the middle and the cheerfully radiating petals, but it has a subversive magic. Left to its own devices in a parking strip the stalks will grow five or six feet tall, their feathery leaves creating a diffuse haze that looks like smoke. The shade of pink transcends all others except perhaps the pink of sunset: it’s the good pink. I made this drawing the other day after studying the first one to bloom in my April garden. It’s good to see a bee show up and follow directions. Something is working in this world.

Filed Under: Drawing, The Garden Tagged With: artist garden, cosmos, drawings of flowers, flower and bee, flower drawing, mixed media drawing

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Morning pages. Reading Wallace Stevens’ ‘13 wa Morning pages. Reading Wallace Stevens’ ‘13 ways of looking at a blackbird’ for the thousandth time and finding it completely new.
Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the sol Hello solo travelers….are we odd to love the solitude of taking in a place with every one of our senses, unmitigated by the relational bypass legislated by the need to tend to whether the Other is: okay/happy/comfortable/entertained etc…? Tonight I’m sharing notes on my (new) dedicated weekly visit to the travel state of mind, in which I go somewhere in public as though I was a tourist and read and write and armchair travel. 

I love company, don’t get me wrong. I have traveled with, and without. Evenings are not always at ease. In 1990 I went to a Typography Conference in Oxford. Dropped my luggage a week ahead and took a train to the Lakes. Me and every honeymooning couple of the year, in 19th century bed and breakfasts (all booked by pre-internet postal and phone call.) Horsehair mattresses, pineapple-carved bedposts. Two other non-honeymooning people were allowed into the 40-mile square Lakes that month. They did not make eye contact. 

So it was me and Beatrix Potter, and the “jacket potato”, an unfortunate menu staple that involved baked beans + baked potatoes (in far too close proximity) alone with our observations writing letters home to whichever boyfriend it was left behind. (Here I gracefully omit the grand ball under the tent on the Thames back at the conference and everything that happened after. . .) The Thames is why the British invented elipses. 

I had told myself on some errant Tuesday that England was the size of Whidbey Island. It was a rare lapse, in which I completely forgot: world history? Oh, wait, the Beatles. + King Arthur. Stones and tables and swords. Forgive me while I go re-watch the intro to #Outlander….

Daunting to study the guidebook and realize I should have started this project when I was 11. I have been to England three times. I cannot fathom how I thought I could go again and not want to see everything: every cathedral, flea market, moody moor, outsider mural and Arabic bakery, cinematically filtered through a modern mashup of Virginia Woolf and Peaky Blinders.
Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I fi Amid the clamor and noise of our online lives I find myself sometimes seeking very simple places to land. What better place to land then water? In the series of architectural works in progress one of my subjects is the Chittenden Locks. You can’t have the locks without the water that lives to be raised and lowered. These subtle tethers between invisible guide posts and unseen actors offstage speak to me not just of infrastructure and industry, but of our connections to one another. 

I live in a city that has decided resolutely that Zoom is the same as actual conversation. The model embraced here is “if it looks good, as a facsimile, it’s probably good enough.” What a loss for all of those who have spent a lifetime in a craft perfecting real things. Serif, proportion, texture, text— all made visible through touch. One tug of a rope, one breath of wind, and this whole image redesigns itself. With photographic art I can make images without ever smearing paint or lifting out. I touch with my eyes and mind. What makes it human is metaphor. What keeps you tethered to this world, and to others?
Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and archi Work in progress: Seattle icons of place and architecture. This piece harkens to another time. Old world rotogravure, lithography, the specimen studies of explorers first seeing the tropics, or the to-them “new world.” Also to the early psychedelic history of Seattle, where if your UW professor was missing in class he might be sitting in one of the mythic cedars at Volunteer Park, or cactus gazing in the steamy other-world of the conservatory. It was a magical time, and the park was the incandescent center. 

The way I work is by deconstructing the real into many subtle layers of color and tint and tone, and then recomposing as though each piece of photographic information was a plate. In my architectural images and botanical work a piece like this can go back-and-forth for a long time between realism and atmosphere and I never know until the very last step exactly where it will land.
Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by Best way to contemplate landscape and travel is by candlelight.
Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I sta Study of place, Volunteer Park Conservatory. I start my morning pages with barely formed questions: 

What is a dream? Is a glass house safe or waiting to be broken? What is the effect of layering and repetition, a note repeated more and more softly without elaboration?

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