IskraFineArt

Composition en Route to Georgetown

God I love the backs of trucks. Late afternoon winter light, a miracle around here, where foggy smudgy is the rule. A long drive to get supplies at Grainger, where all the men wear overalls and the women tuck their hair under hardhats and don't smile much. I fell inlove with this truck on Fourth Avenue South. My phone went low res, but after some finessing I think the compositional magic is clear. Renaissance light, theme and variation, and subject matter with a purpose: Workin, workin, get outta my way.

 

Wayfinding: The Walking Man Goes Shopping at Night

Still under the influence of the recent piece at NeuroTribes (how I wish I had thought of that name!)  on the evolution of the first icons for personal computing. I am temporarily abandoning leaves and the druid-watch of autumn melancholies for pure urban you-r-here-nowness. When I am no longer in love with the Walking Man, when the affair is over, you will be the first to know. Meanwhile, here we are, being told what to do and when to do it, in this case: Stop, LookBothWays, go Forward, protected in the night, -- to buy dinner. 

© Iskra Johnson

This image was captured with a cellphone, my intimate conspirator. No traffic tickets were incurred in the making, although it was close. I am going to enlarge this about a 20 or 30 times and print it and see what happens, to see if the intimate space can scale up and what that feels like. I do so love the 2 by 3 inch jewels of the cellphone. Perhaps we will return to the age of stereoscopes, and entire museum exhibits will be set up to witness modern life in the Victorian mode.

"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

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....?

Postcards from the Edge

 
The Artist Trust EDGE program was an extraordinary week. Fifteen dedicated artists of diverse mediums, and a roster of fine business coaches, curators and time management gurus together at Fort Worden in Port Townsend. We had spectacular weather. I will be processing this experience for many months to come, but here are a few photographs I took during the week that give you a sense of the place. I have enough material for a year of prints.

 

I'll admit working on an "artist statement" intermittently and obsessively for seven days at first seemed like an exercise in self absorbtion and folly. Especially as I had no computer and wrote the thing by hand -- how I missed playing the piano of the keyboard! But on the last morning as I set out to shoot, everything suddenly came together and made sense. I feel like I really know why I am doing what I am doing as an artist, perhaps for the first time.  

 

Iskra in Icon Show at Fraker/Scott

I hope you will come down to Pioneer Square this first Thursday to the opening of the juried "Icon" show at Fraker/Scott Gallery. The show will be up for a month, with a reception for the artists and an awards ceremony on Saturday, September 24 from 5-7 PM. The gallery is located at 121 Prefontaine Pl. S  in the Tashiro Kaplan building (425.883-4633.)

My piece is a collage transfer print created from a recent photoshoot in the Duwamish industrial area.  It is both an homage to one of the great emblems of modern engineering, the Hydrant, and a record of one day, captured and layered in collage-space.

©Iskra Johnson "Relic"  Photocollage transfer print on panel

In Retreat: Off to the Edge

I've been mostly absent from the blog this summer, focused on making new experimental work. This weekend I am going to Port Townsend for the Artist Trust Edge Program. (Thank you Artist Trust!)  It is galvanizing to know that I will be spending a full week with other artists in various disciplines, with one focus, absent from my inbox, outbox and the nonstop noise of the news cycle that sits at my fingertips everytime I sit at the computer. The news DOES fuel my work in many ways, but how many disasters can a person absorb? How many quakes, hurricanes, droughts, civil wars, and general geopolitical tragedy???

It will be good be out of the city and nearer the mountains, and to sense Canada near by. This week I saw Herzog's movie  Cave of Forgotten Dreams and I have been dreaming every night since in charcoal and firelight. This year I have been absorbed in technology and photography, and it creates a huge pause to see that movie. I have memorized the horses' faces, and the overlapping profiles of the cave lions. France seems very old, and Canada and the North seems somehow connected to an older time. 

I am working on a series of images using abraded surfaces and found textures that show time's passage. This one features the much beloved traffic cone, beseiged.

 © Iskra Johnson  "Geopolitical"

Summerlight

This is the summer of endless elegy. The forms and colors of winter persist even as the sun comes out for a day or two and temperatures climb above 70. The newly planted vine maple is already turning red and I have not yet gone swimming. Only the foxgloves have been jubilant; this is the year I realized they aren't weeds and let them go wild, a pearl and purple trumpet section playing throughout the garden.

© 2011 Iskra Johnson 

This transfer print blends the layers of sunlight past and autumn's melancholies. The echinacea laid its stems at my feet last October. The sunlight came from my favorite yellow wall at 85th and Greenwood, photographed in 2009, recently graffittied with a luscious red heart and then abruptly painted beige. I am glad I captured its past life in my archives.

I am focusing on transfer prints exclusively right now, enraptured with the tools of the camera and the newest version of Photoshop. I am in that place where you try absolutely everything and sit back dazzled, and then subtract ninety percent of the possible, in search of the necessary. I'll be moving back and forth all summer between two very different themes: the garden, and the street. The hard urban surfaces seem to need the antidote of what grows from the watering can and dirt.

Upcoming Show: Circles, at New Era University House

I am very happy to have four pieces in the show Circles: Artistic Interpretations of the Universal Shape, at University House, 440 Stoneway North. Opening night is this coming Thursday June 16th from 5:30-7:30 and it should be quite wonderful. Something is going on at these openings that is quite different from most openings you will attend. Check out the City Arts' review of what the amazing curator Charlotte Beall has been doing these past six years.

Here are two of the pieces I will be showing, both of them photographic collage transfer prints. One is from a series called "Looking at Infinity" and the other is from "The Street: Wayfinding Continued."

© Iskra Johnson                                                                                                       Infinity Study

 

© Iskra Johnson                                                                                                           Streetwalkers

Phoebe Snow: Talk to Me Some More

Oh, Phoebe, talk to me some more, you don't have to go.....

So many years and moments of my life were lived to the sound of your soaring voice. I made this image in memory of you last night, while listening to The Poetry Man. You will be missed.

© 2011 Iskra Johnson

Pastel and photographic collage  transfer print on Arches 88.