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Mixed Media Adventures: A Process Journal from Iskra Fine Art

April 16, 2021 by Iskra 4 Comments

Vintage Life Woman Iskra Collage
Vintage Life: The Ever-Present Past Perfect Tense

It has been a full season since I last wrote here. I dimly remember a dark winter, (are my socks still damp?) with sunlight rationed as though WW2 never ended. Right now, mid April and 70 degrees, we have an armistice: the bamboo is incandescent in sunlight above the pond and the towhee is singing his one song which is “towhee, towhee.” Annoying, but reassuring, as the song means “here I am, being myself, as usual, and by the way thankyou for not over-pruning the laurel hotel because we really like that leafy wallpaper. Is it British?”

What a relief! We got here! Eggs are being made and laid, the vaccine is working, and someone came for a toasted bagel in my kitchen today: we ate it unmasked, with butter! (I don’t know if it is possible to put too many exclamation points after the buttered toast….)

The little very small things make me very happy. 12 months of pandemic have wrought changes. I have found myself gravitating to the size of the page, an intimate space where art is not performance, but conversation: The missing intimacy of whispers and histories traded and notated in the margins; old books, primers, notions catalogs from St. Louis, 1923, the Seattle Telephone book 1947.

Vintage Phone Book Seattle
When every number started with a letter

In this year the present has seemed indefinitely suspended, and I’ve been going back in time. One restless afternoon I stumbled onto one of Seattle’s last antique stores, soon to be leveled for condos, and began documenting it with my camera. Somehow, in the act of filming a book’s pages as I turned them, words lifted from the page and became sound. On my last visit there I came

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Mixed Media, Painting, Photocollage Tagged With: artist process, collage, collage life, Ink painting, Iskra #100DayProject, mixed media, sumi and photography

Morning Pages | Contemplative Drawing Practice

September 20, 2016 by Iskra 1 Comment

metaphysik-mixed-media-iskra
Vocabulary Practice, Mixed Media Drawing © Iskra Johnson

“Procrastination and mourning are tied tightly together: for to procrastinate is to mourn the precariousness of your creation even before you bring it into the world.

We should perhaps spend more time dwelling on the rich virtuality that precedes the fall into existence. That is, after all, what true contemplation must be about: a commerce with the irreality of things, a learned habit to see them from the privileged perspective of their pre- and nonexistence. Rather than get caught up in the misleading appearance of the material world, we transport ourselves back to a moment when the world, with all its holes and imperfections, hasn’t happened yet.”

— Costa Bradatan, From The Stone, New York Times, September 17, 2016

When I read “Why Do Anything? A Meditation on Procrastination” this weekend I wept with recognition. Accompanied by an exquisite illustration by Leigh Wells, the piece cuts right through to the contradictions and poetry of the  contemplative state. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Drawing, Meditation & Buddhism, Mixed Media Tagged With: contemplative drawing, costa brandatan, mixed media, morning pages, natalie goldberg, procrastination, the stone

Meditation on the Winter Solstice, 2015

December 22, 2015 by Iskra 3 Comments

Winter Solstice, 2015

“I shut my eyes in order to see.”— Gauguin

 

The-Pale-House
The Pale House, printing ink on paper, © Iskra Johnson

There are structures designed to withstand earthquakes and there are structures built to slowly decay. These are scaffolds of membranes that melt under rain and light until the wind can blow through, rocking them lightly back and forth. The seed, meant to escape, might remain for years, seemingly weightless, but weight enough to keep the structure anchored. Time moves around it.

I lived for awhile, many years ago, in a former Catholic monastery. The light that came in through stained glass and wooden shutters filled the rooms with rare colors and a sense that every moment within had been granted or won. In this domain  I couldn’t make a cup of tea without a sense of ceremony. In the morning I would choose a cup, pour boiling water through a silver weir and thick black leaves, and settle with my Earl Grey on the back stairs behind the kitchen. There I could sit and watch the world awaken through the steam of bergamot. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mixed Media, Object Lessons: Essays and images inspired by "A History of the World in 100 Objects.", The Garden, The Spiritual in Art Tagged With: botanical art, home, meditation, mixed media, object lessons, organic architecture, tomatillo, winter solstice

Almanac Entry, December 9th

December 10, 2015 by Iskra Leave a Comment

the stunned bird, mixed media on plaster by Iskra

Memory, December 9, 2015

A summer day, July. The air giddy with heat and mote-filled like the river in California. Everything buzzing and humming and hungry.

The birds in their circumference of delight swooped from locust to maple and up to the roof. The clouds, shimmering cellophane white like molten sand showed themselves twice: here, and also there, exactly. Easy to fly into the unreal cloud and be met with blackness, sudden and complete.

The bird lay for a long time, whether sleeping or stunned could not be determined. After due consideration of the forms of interference the gardener let sun and wind and ravens take their path. A few days later she opened the window and the bird was gone.

       – The Gardener’s Almanac of Irreproducible Phenomena, Chapter 3

 

Artwork: “The Stunned Bird,” © Iskra Johnson, mixed media collage

Filed Under: Mixed Media Tagged With: almanac, bird, gardener's journal, mixed media, nature art, venetian plaster

Iskra with Painters Under Pressure at Seattle Sampling December 4-6

November 13, 2015 by Iskra Leave a Comment

When my print arts salon, Painters Under Pressure, suggested we do the Seattle Sampling December studio tour it was. . . . July. No sweat, plenty of time! Now we are all in that wonderful pre-show manic state of trying to make art round the clock while life in its inconvenient way interferes. Laundry? Bookkeeping? The Gym? Huh. I have never made so much work in such a compressed period of time. I think the happiest state, the state of mind I treasure most, may be just pure focus, and I’m there, even if I am wearing last week’s socks. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Mixed Media Tagged With: artist studio tour, holiday sale seattle, Japanese pearapple, mixed media, open studio, Painters Under Pressure, pyrus pyrifolia, Seattle sampling, venetian plaster

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Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: I added baking soda to my gesso. Pretty wild texture here, not sure yet how stable it is. You can see the test of the edges in the second piece— the rugged edge only works if I get a pristine background and unfortunately the tape I used to mask it did not work consistently. Hello tape, my old friend and nemesis. You work differently on every surface. These little barn structures give me great comfort as the bigger structures of our government and nation seem to be crumbling.
Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the fields somewhere, on the road to Edison. Acrylic on prepared ground, sketchbook.
MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai We MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei at Seattle Art Museum.
I am thinking this morning about the phrase Americ I am thinking this morning about the phrase American Heartland. Learning to paint a barn means studying the neutrals. Our political discourse has pitted the barn people against the city people and there are no neutrals, just shouting. But if you walk out into the horizon lands, all you hear is the wind and a kestrel. Walk in boots, hard-pressed against your toes, walk on stubble barefoot and get acupuncture for a lifetime. Study the intervals: how the clouds can be in the upper one third neatly or one sixth, precarious, the future disappearing with the sun as it falls making the barn your whole world if you’re three years old and looking up; one big triangle with a square in the center, and so many mysteries inside the square. 

There is also the question of what kind of light seeps between the verticals and is the light coming in the evening or at midday when you can finally begin to make out all the other tiny squares within the big square, which would be called hay. Reach for the rope and swing out over the canyon, that great big canyon from bale to bale.

Collage studies: painting neutrals
A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yor A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yorker this morning, about the global population crash. This will upend urbanism, for sure, though it will very good for veterinarians and dog groomers:
“Only two communities appear to be maintaining very high fertility: ultra-Orthodox Jews and some Anabaptist sects. The economist Robin Hanson’s back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that twenty-third-century America will be dominated by three hundred million Amish people. The likeliest version of the Great Replacement will see a countryside dotted everywhere with handsome barns.”
First Thursday. Such a beautiful night. First Thursday. Such a beautiful night.

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