IskraFineArt

"Still Life with History and Industry", a New Print from the Industrial Landscape

© Iskra Johnson             14 x 22 inches                     "Still Life with History and Industry"

A recent transfer print inspired by a visit to Harbor Island. 

"100 Objects" Part Two: Art as Devotional Practice

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

On reading "A History of the World in 100 Objects"

 

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.

Line Study with Captive Twig: An Ode to Botanical Tradition

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 

Seattle Print Arts Salon Meeting at Ruth Hesse Studio

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 

 

 

Hilo, the Big Island, Just Before the Rain

© Iskra Johnson, charcoal dust and water, 15 x 19 "

Why I'm Not a Hiker

It is one of those evenings you live for in the Northwest. The sun is setting as the moon is rising, and the Sound lies in front of me between the arching Madrones like a big indigo plate, rimmed by deeper blue mountains. I am on my evening walk, not really in the city and not quite beyond. I can walk for hours and for miles in any shoes and any weather here. But when people tell me they are going “hiking,” I cringe. I can’t stand gear, or shopping for gear. Gear seems to be what makes a person a “hiker.” That, and not stopping, and accomplishing something.

I stop constantly. I accomplish nothing. I walk, and I am in constant awe, and I am hungry. The mountains stretch as far as I can see, the glazed sky speaks of Hokusai and all the great nostalgics and rhapsodists of days gone by. Rilke, Rachmaninoff, Grieg. An eagle flaps slowly overhead. There is no audience and so there is no soaring, only the pedestrian flap of immense wings. 

I like that where I live there are houses, and their amber lights blend with the first star and the distant freighter. I like that in March I go down into the ravine and in the rain and listening to its clatter on bare branches I hear the unmistakable keening of a woodpecker, and look and look and then discover him two feet in front of me, suddenly sharp in the foreground. And then someone walks by with their golden retriever, with the sound of metal and panting tongue and leather leash. I live in nature, without having to go to nature. She is everywhere.

As I climb the last hill I see the moon between the trees. We are not druids now, and who checks the tides before taking a walk on land? And yet we want to know. A woman passes, dressed in black sweats and reflector tape. “The moon! Is it full?”  

“Full enough for me.”

Industrial Landscape: Unique transferprint ©Iskra Johnson

Iskra in the Black and White Show at Fraker/Scott Gallery

 

Please join me at  the opening of The Black & White Show at Fraker/Scott Gallery this First Thursday, February 2nd from 5-8 PM. I will be exhibiting 13 drawings from the series Drawings in Dust.  In addition, Wanda Pelayo, prints and  Jim Ballard, sculpture. Refreshments will be served.

Fraker/Scott Gallery is on the east side of the Tashiro Kaplan building in Pioneer Square at  121 Prefontaine Place S., Seattle, Washington,98104

Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 11-5.

www.frakerscottgallery.com

The show continues through February 25th. There will be an artist talk on Saturday February 18th from 5-7 PM

Drawings in Dust is an ongoing series of works on paper that takes its its inspiration from the traditions of Asian ink painting and black and white photography. Preview a selection of this work here. Additional pieces are in the two albums in the galleries to the right, Drawings in Dust I and II.

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Is Bremerton The New Brooklyn? Many Reasons to Visit The CVG Show 2012

Ok, ok, I know Burien has been fighting for this title, (and in fact it may not even be relevant, since I am told by some that China, the entire nation, is the new Williamsburg, and who cares about Brooklyn anyway, aren't we over the USA??), but I would like to take this opportunity to point out that Bremerton has pretty much everything you need in a burgeoning arts community, and much to make its preening big sister to the east jealous.

This is a town where you can still find an affordable home, median price $199K. It's a place where nature rules, and with considerable drama: In 2010 two bald eagles fighting over a fish knocked out power on Pleasant Avenue, electrocuting one bird in the process. It's a place where you can spend the night at an upscale bed and breakfast or opt for a romantic and educational sleepover on an actual Navy destroyer from the Vietnam War. You can also see bits of submarines embedded in one of the fabulous waterfront parks, which features fountains that, through a feat of sculptural alchemy, become salmon swimming upstream. You can join the United States Marines and defend our nation in that honorable fashion, or get yourself a studio and make a whole lotta art and defend your aesthetic at the CVG  Show, a rare state-wide juried competition with serious prize money at stake, hosted by Bremerton's Collective Visions Gallery. 

Yes, this is not just a travelogue, but an invitation to visit the CVG Show, which opens January 29th, and which I am honored to be part of. Friends Paula Gill, Jennifer Carrasco and Laura Brodax will also be represented, with pieces that are not to be missed. Kathleen Moles, curator at the LaConner Museum of Northwest Art selected 137 works from nearly 800 submitted. There will be many community events in conjunction with the exhibit. Details can be found at Collective Visions Gallery.

Glen Davis, photographer, graciously granted permission to use his portraits of the Bremerton waterfront. It truly is a marvel, and well worth the trip, even if you don't make it to the show.

© Glen Davis, Legendary Portraits of Manette

New Iskra Fine Art Facebook Page

I have just created a new public Facebook Page for Iskra Fine Art. I will continue posting show openings and news here, but the Facebook Page is a great way to get notices without going to a google reader or other interface. To get updates please click on the link above and click the "Like" button at the top.