Iskra Fine Art

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Spring Tulip Suite Stationary and New Rural Landscapes

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Pink Tulip Arabesque colored pencil drawing
Spring Tulip Arabesque, from an original drawing in colored pencil on Moleskine

It’s Tariff Week, and the stock ticker has gone missing from Fox News today, presumably to indicate what a special moment this is. It’s beginning to feel a lot like 2008. That was the spring I sat stunned at my kitchen table watching the securities auctions fail, the securities that TD Ameritrade had said “were as safe as a money market but better.” My kitchen table became my oasis for reinventing sanity and meaning through drawing. There was no internet, only a radio and a tape cassette. Silence, doom, music, repeat. The silence was at first excruciating, but as I drew, it became an enveloping calm and helped me through a time of instability and fear I had not known before. The blog post of that moment has come in handy several times since. Kitchen tables stand the test of time.

In honor of that memory I have returned to the work created then and refined the drawings as the Spring Tulip Suite in my stationary collection. It has been a quiet revelation to pick up a pencil and to go back into work done 17 years ago. As part of my TariffWeek sale, subscribers to my newsletter receive a 10% discount on items in my shop (excluding stationary.) If you would like to receive a discount code I would love to welcome you as a subscriber!

Tulip Suite Stationary
The Spring Tulip Suite, from originals in colored pencil on Moleskine, available as fine stationary cards in my shop.
Tulip Leaves Fine Art Stationary
Tulip leaves are pure sculpture…As a leaf emerges it turns on its axis towards the light, and each turn creates a ripple of subtle greens and earth shades, at times picking up the blue of the sky.

In other print news, Seattle Art Museum Gallery has added a selection of unframed work from gallery artists, which you can peruse in the front of the gallery by the painting racks. I am excited to have a rotating collection of my limited edition prints there!

Farm Structures sketchbook
Farm structures, acrylic on prepared ground
Sky waiting for cloud form

As in 2020, the eerie lack of rails on society and the economy has brought the opportunity of time to explore and develop new ideas without external pressures. It is a great comfort to go “back to the land” and the farm structures and pastoral patterns of rural life that surrounded me as a child. If, at the end of the next four years, I can paint a convincing barn I’ll be happy. Here are a few quick glimpses of work in the studio: surface, abstraction, atmosphere and architecture.Farm Building 7

Regardless of the weather ahead, the sun today is lovely. I hope you can find the time to take a walk, gather camelias, and admire the incorruptible beauty of spring.