object lessons Archives - Iskra Fine Art

Object Lessons: The Valentine

February 13, 2025 by Iskra Leave a Comment

As work in the studio moves in new directions not yet ready to surface, I offer you, in lieu of new paintings, my morning’s meditation on the season.

I hear this month half-melted in dirty snow belongs to a Saint dressed in velvet. Amid the scrolling bonfires of vitriol, romance still flutters “below the fold” as they used to say, back in the day when you could iron the news in half.

Forgive me if I had misplaced February. At Trader Joe’s, on a mission to find King County’s last carton of eggs, I pushed my cart past the bulbs dangling jaundiced roots and the sticks that hold up orchids and arrived at a startling array of succulents in pink ceramic hearts. I paused. Such an unexpected sweetness they offered, tiptoeing into the swirling turmoil of my thoughts. I looked at the scalloped edges of the planters and the cascades of pearls and hens and chicks and said to myself, I am not the kind of person who buys such a thing. [Read more…]

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…]

Object Lessons: The Moon, the Feather, the Leaf, the Rose

October 28, 2015 by Iskra Leave a Comment

The moon is here in all its singularity, full and bright, and daring me to look at it all night and not go blind. November is not yet here but in the wings, and threatening. The mood shifts, worry and fear attendant.

When I think of the year and its divisions, the prismed light across the page, time’s markers are uneven, an anarchic rout. The losses collide into the dark months, and if a few spill into March the chill of winter accompanies. There is good reason to sit in the dark and stare at the moon, realizing more clearly, “Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

This, I think, is why I walk in Autumn and forage until my pockets fill with stones and twigs, why I take huge comfort in contemplation of a single thing. To look at it until it returns my gaze. Until there is no forward or back, or there is both at the same time, a cancellation that returns me to my self. I carry home my gleanings and arrange and rearrange until there is an order, each thing remembered in its place in time.

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Object Lessons: The Valentine

Meditation on the Winter Solstice, 2015

Object Lessons: The Moon, the Feather, the Leaf, the Rose

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