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Terrain and Digital Maneuvers: Two Shows Opening in October

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My work will be in two new group shows opening this week. I am very curious to see how my fellow artists interpret Terrain: Exploring a Common Ground, at Museo Gallery on Whidbey Island. “Terrain” is one of those lovely words you just want to savor with a good beaujolais and fresh bread ripped, not sliced. Clay, dirt, wind, grass, and everything that lies above and below. My pieces in this show explore two different landscapes, the canyon light of city streets and the messy edge where city and country collide. Museo Gallery is in Langley, Whidbey Island, 215 First Street, 98260. The opening is Saturday October 6th from 5-7 and the show continues through October 28th. Hours: 11-5 Wednesday – Monday, Sunday 12-5.

Relic Iskra Print
“Relic,” archival pigment print, 15 x 15 inches

Digital Maneuvers at SAM Gallery presents Kate Sweeney, Troy Gua, Stephen Rock and me, in a show exploring the paths from analog to digital and back again, each of us testing the boundaries of media in different ways. This is the first time I have shown Flatbed, inspired by one of my helpless crushes on a large Industrial Object.

Flatbed print by Iskra
“Flatbed,” archival pigment print, 22×30 inches

I hope to see you at the opening this First Thursday, October 4, 6-7:30 SAM Gallery, 1300 1st Ave, 98101.

Upcoming, some surprises. I hosted the Port of Seattle for a video interview in my studio this week – Yikes!  It’s a long trail from the inner space of making art to talking to the public in front of a camera. (Note to self: Writing is not the same as talking. Maybe I should get out more and practice?) Speaking of which, if you have not yet made it to Taste Restaurant to see ColorBath, give me a shout, and I will be happy to meet you there and explain it all over a glass of wine.

LaConner & Whidbey Island Summer Art Finds (Roadtrip!)

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artis roadtrip in the Skagit by Iskra
Pacific Northwest Pastorale, with Lombardy poplar (that would be a French tree….)

Let’s say you kick back for the 4th and check your social media and once again all your friends are posting vineyard photos of the South of France and the rest of them are gloating about having immigrated to Canada. You could be consumed with a terrible envy, or you could do what we did and make a tiny trip up the road and around the Sound and come back sated with beauty right here in the Pacific Northwest. Instead of waiting three hours in a ferry line we started the weekend art tour by skipping up the road to LaConner by way of Conway. The plain, thrilling ungentrified beauty of the Skagit reminded me there is life outside of Crane City and brooding about the hyperventilated cost of a 175 square foot room with a bed. Did I mention those trees in the photo above are French?

Also, there are cats. [Read more…]

The Art of Infrastructure

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“For poets of the ordinary nothing has to be something else to be more than what it is.”— Anon

For People who Like Orange, industrial art print by Iskra
For People Who Like Orange, Mixed media archival pigment print on paper or canvas, size variable up to 50″

Contain. Hold. Spill. Accept. Refuse. ref-yoos. Dumpsters put a lid on what we can’t bear to keep or smell or look at any longer, and give us the illusion that our national sin of consumer indulgence is not squandered, but instead made noble through the absolution of waste management. All that discarded packaging is repackaged and sits neatly on the street in a box. Occasionally the lid lifts at a provocative angle and stays there, held by chains and wheels in suspension and possibility. Crows come. Lunch is foraged, toasters reclaimed, and on certain days of the week someone finds a discarded mattress and takes a nap. Dumpsters have their own oratory. Although more punk rock than symphony, every city gets a daily concert of metal on metal and smashing glass, the rumble of trucks, and the quieter transcripts of disenfranchisement and identity that take place at night, each one overwriting the other with a soft hiss and the percussive shake of the little ball in its can of paint. [Read more…]

Winter Paintings from the Sea

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“When a young painter said he wanted to paint the moon, someone pointed out, ”But you can’t paint the moon, the moon belongs to Max Ernst.”— from Rowing Toward Eden, By Ted Morgan

New Year’s morning has dawned with sunlight and snow. The forecast is for optimism, a lovely antidote to the last months of 2016. In spite of temperatures near freezing, my mind is on the beach. I have been finishing paintings for the Museo Gallery winter show opening in January. Although the title of the show is “Beach Party,” every rowdy bash has someone who wanders off to find shells and tumbled glass and the perfect small stone to put with the other five hundred and fifty in the back yard, and that would be me. The bright colors will have to come from somebody else’s beach towel, I am just too immersed in celadon.

Glass moon bottle photograph
Photo © Iskra Johnson

For the weeks that I have been painting water and shells Max Ernst’s “Moon in a Bottle” has floated on the periphery of my mind. [Read more…]

The Artful Life: A Visit with Patti King

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An artful life

With the Solstice the weather in Seattle has shifted full-tilt into summer. It is hard to go inside and work in the studio when the sky opens to a clear blue. Today I am taking time away from work to reflect and write about influences and inspirations, in particular the  inspiration that comes from time spent with other artists in their studios and homes.

To prepare my mind for a writing project I like to close my eyes in the garden under the dogwood tree by the pond. There, as prisms of light sift down through the leaves onto my eyelids, I can let my thoughts wander until, with a few nudges, they begin to collect around a subject and form into sentences. This morning before starting the process of contemplation I had begun to eat an apple, and I took it with me and set it down on the arm of the chair. I settled back and drifted on the breeze of summer sounds: the clatter of lawn mowers, the whir of dragonflies and the soft shush of pampas grass. A thought emerged and with it the immediate habitual impulse to reach for my phone. So of course, eyes still shut, I reached for. . . . [Read more…]

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