© Iskra Johnson 14 x 22 inches "Still Life with History and Industry"
A recent transfer print inspired by a visit to Harbor Island.
I have slowly been working my way through "A History of the World in 100 Objects" (see previous post.) I have given up the idea of dutiful chronological study and instead I choose chapters at random. Last night I landed on "Gold Coins of Kumaragupta" and found a passage on Hindu worship that struck me on multiple levels:
Hindus will see a deity, on the whole, as God present. God can manifest anywhere, so the physical manifestation of the image is considered to be a great aid in gaining the presence of God. By going to the temple, you see this image that is the presence. Or you can have the image in your own home -- Hindus will invite God to come into this deity-form, they will wake god up in the morning with an offering of sweets. The deity wil have been put to bed in a bed the night before, raised up, it will be bathed in warm water, ghee, honey, yoghurt, and then dressed in handmade dresses -- usually made of silk -- and garlanded with beautiful flowers and then set up for worship for the day. It's a very interesting process of practicing the presence of God.
--Shaunaka Rishi Das, Hindu cleric and Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
There is a wonderful poignance to this image of bathing the deity, of feeding it sweets, of dressing it -- such tenderness. It made me think, where do I practice this in my own life? And do I practice this in my work?
I am getting ready to launch a new and revised version of my website, and in the process I am going through my archives and deciding what to add in, keep or delete. After sleeping on the passage above, I remembered a series I had done a long time ago which reflects this same devotional impulse, although not in a Hindu frame of reference. For about a year I painted hundreds of small studies of African fetish figures. I used books on African sculpture as my reference, and did my studies the way I would practice kanji, repeating them over and over again, on different papers and with different paints and inks, trying to allow the "figure" to become part of me. The practice became a mobius of energy between myself and the ritual object. The koan was "what is the self?"
© Iskra Johnson
The figures fell into fifteen or twenty different tribal archetypes including a woman holding her head, her body or her baby, a figure holding a mirror, a figure holding a drum, and a recurring double figure, two conjoined in various ways. The paintings' very smallness helped me to keep the practice devotional. I wasn't creating anything for a "wall." But I was inviting the gods into my house. It is good to remember to open that door.
©Iskra Johnson
©Iskra Johnson
Reading space reclaimed. No charcoal dust allowed in this corner.
Definitions of the verb “to read” routinely omit the key ingredient that makes reading reading: I would define it as: to enter an immersive state by way of the sequential turning of the pages of a book. <Syn>: to dive, to swim, to be transformed by knowledge and imagination. I can track the date at which my capacity to enter this state vanished with the arrival of my smart phone. Also in danger, the capacity to attach meaning to anything for longer than it takes to text a smile emoticon. I have watched over the past year as the foundations of what I used to fondly think of as "focus" and "purpose" seem to be slipping away. It seems that I have handed over my brain for rewiring by cyber-reality, without building in a compensating survival channel.
In recognition of this dire situation I bought a book, a big, real hardcover book that cost over $40 from a still-standing bricks and mortar bookstore and decided to use it as my way to “practice reading” and rediscover the immersive state. I first noticed the book on the new arrivals table, picked it up, and while holding it felt my pulse quicken as though I had locked eyes with a handsome stranger on a train. I put it back and thought about it for a week. I went back.
Now each evening I look forward to curling up on the couch with a chapter of “A History of the World in 100 Objects” by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. The book began as a radio program broadcast by the BBC. In the absence of visual reference, the power of the chosen 100 objects had to be conveyed by narration alone, which accounts in part for the elegance, precision and lyric beauty of the prose. A book of this size, two inches thick and weighing three pounds, is not convenient. The pages do not lie flat; you must anchor them with your thumb or your elbow. It is a physical act, this reading. The book itself is an object of contemplation.
MacGregor covers a dizzying range of objects and eras: the first Ming banknote, an Mozambiquan throne of guns, the Borobudur Buddha head,a sandal label from the time of the Pharaohs. The object that has won my complete allegiance comes early, the Ice Age mammoth antler from Montastruc carved with swimming reindeer. It marks a change in the development of human consciousness:
Across the world, humans started to create patterns that decorate and intrigue, to make jewellery to adorn the body, and to produce representations of the animals that shared their world. They were making objects that were less about physically changing the world than about exploring the order and the patterns that can be seen in it….The stone tools we looked at previously raised the question of whether it is making things that makes us human. Could you conceive of being human without using objects to negotiate the world? ....Why do all modern humans share the compulsion to make works of art? Why does man the tool-maker everywhere turn into man the artist?
The description of the two reindeer that follows gives me huge respect for what goes into really “knowing” antiquities. Scholars and archaeologists see not just the beauty of the carving, but they can discern that the season is autumn, when the reindeers' antlers are longest and their coats are healthiest. The female swims behind the male, and is carved with accuracy only a hunter and butcher of animals could have known. This artifact comes from a time 13,000 years ago when reindeer roamed Europe and were the chief source of food and survival for human hunter-gatherers. Archeologists can tell that at least four different stone technologies were used to carve it. And spiritual scholars and thinkers see more:
You can feel that somebody’s making this who was projecting themselves with huge imaginative generosity into the world around, and saw and felt in their bones that rhythm. In the art of this period you see human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that’s going on around them, in a way which isn’t just about managing the animal world, or guaranteeing them success in hunting. I think it’s more than that. It’s really a desire to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and that’s actually a very religious impulse, to be at home in the world. We sometimes tend to identify religion with not being at home in the world, as if the real stuff were elsewhere in Heaven; and yet if you look at religious origins, at a lot of the mainstream themes in the great world religions, it’s the other way round – it’s how to live here and now and be part of that flow of life. –Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
I read this and am filled with elation. I also look back at my earliest attempt at sculpture and can only laugh with gallows humor at how far from Ice Age integrity I have come. At eight I was given an Ivory Soap elephant-carving kit. Yes I, a mostly city girl who sometimes lived on a farm about as far away from elephants as a person can possibly get, was going to learn sculpture by carving what I profoundly did-not-know. I looked at the diagrams, I held the cube of soap in my hand, I despaired. And it only got worse as the soap slipped and the tools gouged and nicked, chopping off precious and irreplaceable Ivory. The ear resembled an ear only from the left, above, and became a leaf of cabbage from any other direction. I recall setting down the tools on the farmhouse kitchen table and wondering, how do you hide an elephant?
A few years ago I found myself with a group of people in a house on a hill in Utah, being guided by a sculptor through a visioning exercise that involved a ball of clay. As we closed our eyes and looked inward we warmed the clay with our hands. And then, eyes still closed, we started to make what we saw. That is as close as I have come to the knowing of the Ice Age cave.
I recommend this book to anyone involved in creative work. As I use it as my daily meditation it gives me perspective on the outer shells of commerce and ambition that surround artmaking in the modern world. It makes me look with greater depth at what art means now, at how or if it should be connected to the past,-- and if so, which past.
Spring is coming too early; green shoots, unfurling leaves. I have been shouting at the clematis and honeysuckle and lillies to stop. We need more sleep, more dreaming time -- and snow is on the way. I am in winter still, in love with architecture.
© Iskra Johnson "Twig in Space: Botanika" 22 x 16 inches, mixed media
Tonight Painters Under Pressure, my SPA salon, met at the studio of Ruth Hesse. In addition to being talented printmakers and artists this group of 7 is rousingly funny and has an appreciation for food and politics, both of which take up at least some part of our monthly meetings before we get to the central business of sharing and critiquing our work. I will be doing a detailed profile on the salon at a later time.
This post is an alert to those who may not have heard that Ruth is having her fabulous annual print sale this weekend. Ruth's East Magnolia studio is tucked into a marine area in view of the water and a dazzling maze of industrial stuff. I've got to go back in the daylight. This is an area I have never been to and it seems like a whole mysterious city-behind-the-city that I had never known existed. You can get a map and directions to the studio here. The sale will be from 2-6 on Sunday February 26th, with prices ranging from $35 to $1,000. Below, some quick cellphone snaps of her work and space.
See more of Ruth Hesse's work at her website.
"Often, my prints live in my To Be Continued folder, where they germinate until I have the right combination of colors and textures to layer on top of them. I live for the moment when discordant elements come together to make something unpredictable and beautiful. That’s what excites me about monotype.
Life is a layering of experiences, be they planned, spontaneous, embarrassing, proud, painful or sublime. Without that layering, there’s no depth. There’s great hope in accepting the difficult stages in life (or the life of a print), placing faith in the process that everything will turn out okay in the end." --R. Hesse
© Iskra Johnson, charcoal dust and water, 15 x 19 "
