IskraFineArt

Ambiguity and Beauty

This morning I am at work on the idea of  the screen, as in a real analogue screen made of paper or silk, and the long tradition in Asian art of dividing the landscape into panels. When I walk around the lake, particularly in Autumn, when the leaves are so perfectly missing in places and hanging by a golden thread in others, I feel like I am walking right into a silk painting. As I've been working on this image of the willows, going back and forth between reflection and reality, water and sky, it occurs to me that ambiguity itself is beauty. 

"There is a Crack in Everything...That's how the Light Gets in"

I can't shake the November state of mind today. The lowering skies, the gusting winds. The pond and the rake. The maple tree that has grown for 12 years along the south side of the water has that fatal illness of maples, with black rings inside its branches. This is the last year I will stare into its red lanterns in the summer afternoons, and sift its colors from tangled lillies and gravel in late Autumn.

On a recent aftrnoon the light fell in such a way that it looked like this, like a cliff, and an abyss, and a refuge, that crack in Leonard Cohen's wonderful bell, the dark and somber and jubilant Anthem:

     Ring the bells that still can ring
     Forget your perfect offering
     There is a crack, a crack in everything
     That's how the light gets in

©Iskra Johnson

Heat and Motion Research: Watching the Leaves

This morning the hard frost has arrived. What this means for people in Seattle is that it is not raining. The word "transfixion" was created for mornings such as this. There is a serious danger that I will do nothing for the rest of the day but sit on the porch in a quilt robe watching. A cat has it easy--it is their JOB to sit above the heat register on the windowsill and follow the leaves one by one, and no one thinks they are lazy or undermotivated.

In my backyard the sun comes through the last yellows of the plum and the maple, silhouetted against my neighbors' giant firs. As the sun rises and warms the branches, one by one they let loose their leaves. They fall,  like feathers, slowly, randomly, jubilantly,  I wish I had such grace in letting go.

© Iskra Johnson  Gouache and watercolor

This study is from long ago, when I first discovered David Hockney and started sleeping with his complete works under my pillow.

Loving Your Computer to Death

Is it possible to love your computer too much? To have gone just too deep into digital space and to have the equivalent of a near-death experience of your very cyber-cells? This morning I turned on my computer and saw this:

It definitely takes me someplace. I'm on the beach with that childhood beachball, I'm in the market sifting through ikat weavings, I'm shredding every letter from every love from the seventh grade on and cutting them into strips, a condensed collage of regret and what-if. 

With my main screen down I was forced to catch up on the Huffington Post on my high-functioning Droid, where I accidentally clicked on the UK version. There the headline banner is the arrest of Khadafi's son; the US front page is the return of "Arrested Development." But one wouldn't want to read too much into this.....

Eulogy

© Iskra Johnson

This morning the lawn was brilliant with yellow leaves and a windy light. By late afternoon the sky had darkened, and snow is predicted tomorrow. I looked at the fallen lillies and melting hostas, all the garden's brave last gasps of color, and laid my head upon the memory of summer. Where is that attic bedroom, that one with chenille bedspread and the embroidered pillow? The one where afternoon light motes were gold as pollen and the bees gathered in the windowsills....?

The Lake, Late Autumn

© Iskra Johnson

Street Koan

© Iskra Johnson

Work in progress.What is the street? Who is looking?

November Meditation: The Blue Heron

Something about this time of year makes me feel like talking to Morris Graves. I feel like he is with me, brooding on leaves and picking up branches, and looking for the light in the fine grays and browns of the northwest melancholy. The heron has not been been to visit the pond in a long time. Perhaps this will call him back.

©Iskra Johnson transferprint on Arches 88

Street Language

A new print with my tireless companion, the Walking Man

© Iskra Johnson  Transferprint collage on Arches 88, 11" by 22"