IskraFineArt

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.

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.....

Tacoma Suite: Transfer Print Journal

 

© 2010 Iskra Johnson

Alcohol transfer prints on Moleskine. From photographs of the eternally quiet streets of Tacoma on a lovely gray day.

Postcard From the Village

The robins have been ice skating on the pond. Every morning just as I am finishing my tea they confer en masse, and compete with the starling, the bold jay and the infinite supply of juncos for stage time. I have been thinking about the idea of village at this time of year, so focused as it is on connection and on gathering together. I went out to get my mail, and the mailbox startled me with its beauty. As I walked back through the snow ideas of human friendship, of nature's dumb and lovely company and the ways we stay in touch when far away swirled in my mind.

I started with a juxtaposition of the robin and the mailbox, and then realized that the robin properly belonged on his own card, "in" the box. I found an ancient postcard from a dear friend who wrote to me from Germany the day she met her true love. If ever I considered throwing out the archives of a lifetime's correspondence today I thought better-- to have nothing but email in ones' drawer and to have to buy emotional ephemera from Ebay......!

I can't decide which of these two versions works better. I tried about a million layer effects and sizes of the postmark. I laboriously changed the date to today (now hidden.) I finally knocked it back to almost invisible. I rarely put human faces in my work as I am more interested in asking the audience to see the view rather than to notice the viewer. But I think I like this woman of the German stamp. She has a winter face.

On the other hand, the pure nature narrative, the robin trading me his bright color for a few sunflower seeds. Tell me what you think.

© 2010 Iskra Johnson

First Snow, 2010

I took a walk to get basics, praying that on this snowbound day before Thanksgiving the multitudes would leave me bagels. (They did, and I can love them for this as the Pilgrims would.) On the way I saw a man on a bicycle smiling on sheet ice. He shouted as he pedaled past, "This is the best kind of weather!" Next up a white dog, looking fine and pretty and knowing white on white works. I felt like I was looking at the new York Times fashion issue and it hurt. I had miss-matched mittens and one hand, the leather driving glove hand, seemed to have gone green with frostbite. I stopped at Sears. Give me the Lands End special, a pedigreed 30 below warm fisted mitten, please.

On the way home I walked by the car where in July a woman leaned against hot blue metal in a floor length fur coat and smoked a cigarette. Today, surrounded by frozen mud and snow and ice,  her car was covered with beachtowels, floral tablecloths from the old country, and lurid afghans in red and orange and green. I noted especially the striped cords binding the afghan to the windshield. There was no snow on the car itself and so perhaps this is some kind of magic. There are things I do not understand, and for this I am also thankful, even a day earlier than necessary.

Tulips at the Kitchen Table

© Iskra Johnson

I have started a new drawing book that is having a big effect on every part of my life. I haven't drawn from life in a long time. I had forgotten how mesmerizing it is, and how when you look up hours later at random things the world seems to glow with color, and the new knowledge of how to mix shadows and light. As an unexpected side effect my daily memory has radically improved. I no longer stand in the kitchen five times a day wondering where I put my keys.

More to come on this project as it progresses.

Journal Entry from LAX: Where is the Village?

 

© Iskra Johnson 2010

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I am coming from a place where the main street is a river, where every person who passes every other person says Hola, where dinner is caught at dawn and served at night by torchlight, where on Sunday morning they wake you with cannons and the scolding of churchbells until you leap from your bed to say YES! I am coming! I am truly here! Ranchero music announces the weekly arrival of gasoline and when a steer gets loose he is roped to a palm tree, a bridge and a delivery truck, in that order. Every time I see him on the cobblestone path this dog gives me The Look: Unabashed need? Resignation? Desperation? Love? and I offer it back.

I am coming from a place where you go each night to the ocean to celebrate the sunset to a place where you do not see the sun except on television advertising Mexico, neon blue seahorses swimming on plasma screens above the cheese-dripping BurgerKing. I am entering a particularly grim system of transport designed to squeeze you through as quickly as possible to the next destination, accompanied by the barking percussion of bins and belts, jewelry and shoes and the irritated squall of security alarms. Only now do I learn about the man who almost blew himself and everybody else up with his underwear. We shuffle.

I am entering the First World, the Fast World, the world where everyone is talking to someone who is not here, and listening to music only they can hear, although I can feel the bass humming through the man next to me and ask him "could you turn your ipod down?" -- so I can remember the ranchero music in my head. I have a shell in my pocket and sand biting my heels. Memory feels already very fragile. 

Next to me a man comments to no one in particular, "This place is ugly. The light is bad. It feels lonely." I want to embrace him, because he is saying aloud what I am feeling, he is saying, Where is the Village? I scribble a resolution on my boarding pass, "look for the village wherever you are. Don't wait for catastrophe." 

Three days later, Haiti. Now the world has another chance to shrink to human size.