IskraFineArt

Walking Meditation

I have been visiting the lake often in this early Autumn. The season has changed and has scrubbed this magic circle bare of fun-lovers and tourists. The colors are quiet, the birds now own the diving platform and the reeds wholly. The mothers, the strollers, the nature stalkers and the brooding contemplatives are left to themselves to notice what they see.

I have been thinking a lot about the nature of "Photographicness." The camera's eye is so irreducibly clear and the screen so translucent. It seems more real than real. And yet when the artifact of this seeing makes its transition unaltered to its home on paper it goes through a metamorphosis. In some ways it seems to die. The more "real" something is the more I recognize it. And the more quickly I look away, as though I "know" what it has to tell me already.  So I have been experimenting with subtraction, reduction and transference. This first image is an image that lives in digital form only. The second one is an archival pigment transfer on Lustro Dull Cover.

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Why? The Buddhist and the Secular version of the Big Question.

The Ice Cream vendor returns with The Big Question on his mind. He wanted it, he did try. But he finds himself on Wanted posters all over town.

Archival transfer prints 14 by 20 inches on Fabriano watercolor paper.  © Iskra Johnson 2009

Lake Light

Transfer print on watercolor paper.                                                       

Light Study II

The light is so brief in the Northwest. I feel panicked to capture it and keep it and put it in a bottle up high in the window where I can see it every day. Transfer print with water color 14 x 20 inches.

Composition with Summer and Odd and Even Numbers

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The Happiness Project in another guise......Mixed media on paper, 10 by 17 inches.

The Happiness Project

Be Happy

Seattle has never seen weather like this. 100 degrees in the shocked garden, 95 in the studio, 91 in the kitchen. The heat melts all resistance. Complete strangers walk up to you and offer to buy you an ice cream cone. It is easy to keep walking until midnight, around and around the lake. Why eat dinner until the moon sets?

I find myself thinking of happiness, and of ice cream. Of Bobby McFerrin and the melodies of ease and satisfaction. This little toy has been my companion for so many years I have lost count. He requested a portrait, and I have obliged. The pieces in this series are created with my own photography, drawing and assemblage, and reproduced as transfer prints from an archival Epson on rag paper. Each one is unique, and close up the surface resembles woodblock or letterpress. I have not been able to edition these yet because it is so hot the plates rip the paper. As soon as the weather shifts however prints will be available for sale.

The Marble Game

     Thinking About Thinking

But What About the Penguins?

This print keeps changing as the temperature gets so high that the thermostat....oy, it has actually broken. But as I said above, resistance is futile. Now I think I will take a cold shower and then I really should go to the store and open the freezer door at the Haagen Daz department.

What Does Heaven Look Like

On November 13, 2005 I opened the newspaper to a striking and disturbing photograph of an Iraqi woman suicide bomber. Her bomb had failed to go off and she was captured unharmed.  Her husband succeeded in his mission, blowing up an entire wedding party.  I kept this image on my bulletin board and thought about it for two years, wondering what goes on in the mind of someone who thinks they are going to heaven in the moment of immolation.  This image sequence imagines this moment, from within and without.  You can see the series by clicking on "What Does Heaven Look Like" in the gallery on the left.

This mixed media piece and another of my politically themed pieces can be seen as part of the national ART OF DEMOCRACY network of  exhibits. The show, "Up Against the Two Wall", opened with an artist reception October 3rd from 6-9 PM at the Two Wall Gallery on Vashon Island, 17600 Vashon Highway South. 

The exhibit included local Northwest and some from as far away as Ohio and Minnesota:

Beverly Naidus, Swaneagle, Norma Fried, Selene Vasquez, Greg Hartman, Bob Tomolillo, Todd Thyberg, Rick Tuel, Patti Bowman, Scott Nichols, Ben Meeker, Den Hanmer, Emily Gunter, Ildiko' Kalapa'cs, Betty Gardner, Neil Brooks, Sarah Dillon,  Kristin Morris, Erin Hoffman, Laurel Leuders, Mary Pekarek, Tom Gross Shader, Greg Wessel.

SLEEP STUDIES

Years ago I spent a month traveling in Mexico, where I picked up a very old ex voto painting on tin.  This traditional form of devotional painting shows the narrative of a spiritual or mortal crisis and its resolution.  On the earth, people pray, more often than not someone lies sick in bed, and in the heavens a saint floats, all ears to the prayer scrawled in Spanish across the picture plane.  The bed frame has always haunted me as an object of power in its own right.  Unlike the chair so often depicted by artists as a stand-in for human attitude and contemplation, the bed usually has no arms, and often neither foot nor head.  It sits unadorned, a naked platform on which to project our own memories, dramas and introspections.

This series of paintings started with the desire to experience the ex voto on my own terms and in my own culture.  I do not believe in the saints.  The only apparition that ever appeared in answer to my skyward yearnings was the GoodYear blimp, which revealed its private message to me in red neon in 1972: “Drink Coca Cola.”  I’ve been looking beyond to the rosy sunset for years, wondering.  I do not believe in the saints, but I do believe in their shape.  I have always found consolation in the forms of devotional art, as though even in cultures and belief systems foreign to my own the abstract language itself has meaning.

As I worked on these images the forms evolved back and forth between story, recognizable symbol and abstraction.  My working method starts with careful sketching of composition, stencils and color study, and then I throw up my hands and go with whatever the painting seems to be asking me to do.  All of these images are original paintings created with printing ink applied directly to paper without a press.  To see the rest in the series click on Sleep Studies in the gallery to the left.

Iskra Fine Art

Welcome to a gallery of my fine art.  The galleries on the right contain series of works. The posts below feature individual pieces or the introductory statements for the galleries as well as occasional essays. Unless otherwise noted all artwork is composed of my own original photography, drawing, painting and printmaking. Most artwork is available for exhibition or purchase, either as originals or in some cases as prints.  Please call or email me for details.  Phone: 206.367.2643  Email: iskra at iskradesign.com.  All images © Iskra Johnson and may be reproduced only with the permission of the artist.