Blog: The creative process | conversations with artists | the contemplative impulse in art

Iskra in A Wing and A Prayer at Museo Gallery

January 19, 2021 by Iskra Leave a Comment

I am excited to be part of A WING AND A PRAYER opening at Museo Gallery January 20th, with artists Elena Korakianitou, Michael Dickter, Faith Scott Jessup and Jean Whitesavage.

“A celebration of our ultimate optimism for our world, our embrace of transformation, and a recognition that we may need a little divine help along the way. Opening on a significant day both politically and astrologically, January 20th, Museo hopes that this show will encourage peace and hope.”

Museo is open 11-6 Thursday through Monday.
Tuesdays & Wednesdays by chance, or by appointment.

The show will continue through March 1st.

MUSEO GALLERY
215 First Street | P O Box 548
Langley, WA 98260
360.221.7737
museo@whidbey.com

I will be showing my recent series of limited edition images based on statues of angels, some available framed or mounted on panel, and others available unframed at the gallery or through the Gallery website. The language of statues is one of many ways I’ve explored the distance between sky and earth. This piece, a variation on the myth of Icarus, will be available at the gallery to see in person.

Icarus 3 by Iskra — *Icarus 3, © Iskra Fine Art, variant edition print, several sizes, available to see now at Museo.*

If you have the time to make a day of it I suggest a walk on Double Bluff. Eastern clouds may take their shape from the land, but island clouds listen only to the sky.

Cloud forms at Double Bluff Whidbey Island by Iskra — *Cloud Forms, Double Bluff ©Iskra Fine Art*

Farewell 2020: The Ledger

January 1, 2021 by Iskra Leave a Comment

The Ledger, ©Iskra Johnson

The year: no summary statements can do it justice. Instead, I offer an image, just one: “Ledger.” It began as an exploration of the Mourning Theorems of early American folk art. There was a willow tree. There was the idea of velvet, of fruit baskets arranged and lovingly drawn in another light, (perhaps the pale lyric light of spring,) and of women in “drawing rooms”: women young, old, perilously middle-aged, sometimes barren, but women regardless, perhaps surrounded by thirteen children, or perhaps feeding biscuits to one tottering and garrulous German shepherd in some log cabin shack on the great plains; women reaching for the sewing basket on New Years Eve as muskets went off on the horizon and the men stormed around drunk.

For years I had a ritual of sewing on New years Eve. I had an actual woven reed basket, knee-high, and in it was a stack of clothes going back, and back . . . to the first threadbare jeans and the first embroidered patch on a knee in denim in the 8^th grade. (I think I stitched a rainbow when I was 13, remember those?) At the bottom of the basket was a clown my mother made of socks and Mid-Century Modern fabrics, split down the middle between black and white and color, a harlequin icon of her day, when a housewife had a choice of valium and the vacuum cleaner or dancing to Chubby Checkers in the afternoon and writing letters to the editor. I never could figure out the sock part.

No matter how many years I lived and stitched there remained the New Years Eve memory of some parent playing Dave Brubeck on vinyl in a timeless pocket of the ‘50’s or ‘60’s. Dave Brubeck reached through the ages to meld the 20^th century together with the 17^th, as though time was always going on and had never stopped, guided by the soft shush of the snare and the brush and the insouciant saxophone and the sense of light in an attic reaching through the clouds and coming down to touch everything with a benign blessing.

I could not reconcile this time, in which I am living and have lived, with the velvet drawing rooms and fruit arrangements and the sorrowing empire-waisted women of old and still include the willow. And so the willow disappeared along with the gowned damsels and tombstones and the stone bridge and in its place the lake emerged with its distant shore and the various actors cast in the confounding amber of this strange year of Alone Together: The Pandemic Calamity. I still can’t quite believe we are living through this time and, alas, it is not quite over.

What I hope for is the light of water and clouds, the restorative powers of nature, and for the grace of reflection. As I was sewing on all those New Years’ pasts I was reflecting on the year as it changed from old to new and what was gained and lost: The Ledger. What is on each side in your ledger of the year? What was gained in solitude or its antonym, and what was lost? I know some who follow my blog are medical workers, others are parents, and solitude was hard if not impossible to find. How did you escape? What new connections emerged? What did you let go? Where did you find joy? Did you walk, did you bake, did you reach into your sewing basket to make masks? Leave a comment, send me a letter, I’d love to know how the year finds you and what you see ahead.

All best in 2021,
Iskra

Western Landscape Photography Portfolio

December 15, 2020 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Gate to the West Photography by Iskra — Gate to the West,©Iskra Fine Art

New Directions: Photographs of the Western Landscape

Are there affirmable days or places in our deteriorating world? Are there scenes in life, right now, for which we might conceivably be thankful? Is there a basis for joy or serenity, even if felt only occasionally? Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?

– Robert Adams

In October I found myself in the middle of an ocean of grass almost swallowed by basalt. I looked up at the black palisade of stone stacked against sky, a magpie’s wing shadowing the trail ahead, and asked out loud: “Is this a photograph? Should I follow this impulse? Landscape photography isn’t what I really do…..”

There was long pause as my walking companion vanished around a bend. The field caught the slant of afternoon sun like knife blades, each edge of grass etched against stone. The moment seemed to command me to see and record in a way I was not accustomed to – not with the collage artist’s eye for disassemblage, but as a witness to the exact 1/60th of a second in front of me. I raised my camera and started shooting, unsure of why, but thinking maybe I’d figure it out before the sun set.

Although I have been obsessed with cameras and photography for much of my life, I have never considered myself a traditional “photographer.” Rather, I have seen the camera as way to inquire and to be present in place. The images made have always been secondary to the experience that looking through a lens affords. The technology of f-stops and aperture and ASA, the confounding dials with microscopic lines between here and my destination, and the chance, in analog days, of a precious 36 exposures tripping on a sprocket, all seemed to require a full time German in residence, and I am much more Irish. I have always been immune to systems, and I suffer from profound dyslexia when it comes to math. Someone asked me recently if this new series of landscape photographs was made using the “zone system” and I had to check my voluminous and completely disorganized notes – oh yes, that. My process is intuitive, and overlays multiple systems based on the aesthetics of printmaking and drawing.

In making photographic prints I am looking for luminance and iconic form, and a sense in the body of being there. Are there ten shades of gray from white to black – who cares? Does it feel and look like memory and the way the air moved? Can I smell the smoke in the air, or the sage, or hear the sound basalt makes as it cools down between late afternoon and evening?

Canyon Creek Tree Photo by Iskra — Canyon Creek Tree,©Iskra Fine Art

[Read more…]

Thoughts on the Act of Editing: Photographic Reality, and How you Look at a Forest Fire

December 6, 2020 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Forest Tree Portrait photograph by Iskra — Interregnum, ©Iskra Fine Art (Available in two sizes, click image to see details.)

New Directions: Western Landscape Photography Part 1

Today I have been living with this tree, captured originally in full color (though muted and overcast) in a forest east of the mountains. I say, “this tree,” but you, the viewer, might not be seeing the same tree I am. You might be seeing the tree on the right, scorched by fire, and interlaced with the bleached needles of a pine that may or may not see spring. I am aware of that tree also. But in the moment of stepping into this meadow what stood out against the uneven and patchy hill was the shimmering tree with yellow leaves and white bark. In a soundscape emptied of birds the wind in its leaves made the only sound.

As I go back in time to this moment the digital darkroom allows me to ask “What is this story about?” countless times, and each time to come up with a different answer. A voice I’ve heard often says “People don’t like dark. Make it light, make it hopeful.” Leonard Cohen speaks up on another station and says, helpfully “Make it darker,” as for that poet the darker the shadows the brighter the illumination. In developing a photographic print I cycle through decision after decision, undoing, saving, revisiting, doubting, knowing, unknowing. Each revision of value rewrites light’s story, saying: the point is the mountain, or the pines, or the sky. Finally it may land on this, perhaps a tale of the heroine in white, surrounded by courtiers and knights and armies in the distance.

In the forests around Yakima the shape of the aspens tug at a memory of the archaic, and make me think of Joan of Arc in a book I saw as a child. The pages of the book were engraved and brown at the edges, pungent with age. Joan sat on her horse deep in a copse, her armor camouflaged by dappled light, her sword glinting. The style was detailed, each leaf individually drawn and burnished against a pewter sky. In the grove, momentarily safe, Joan was thinking, and gathering herself. On my hikes I kept looking for her, expecting her to ride forth, tossing her hair as she leaned under a branch, turned a corner on the trail, and paused to look out into the distance. What would Joan have said? Dark or light, or a middle tone? I am not sure, but her horse would have led up the canyon into the fire, which was still smoking. [Read more…]

Pandemic Angel Art from Iskra

November 27, 2020 by Iskra Leave a Comment

The Story of the Pandemic Angels

In September, the week of 9.11, I took a brief trip to Whidbey Island to escape the smoke from the California fires. For the first day the weather was balmy, with a perfectly clear blue summer sky. I wandered the beaches, filled my pockets with shells, and felt the euphoria of the traveler, a feeling I have missed acutely during the pandemic. Later that night the smoke came in. The horizon vanished, and whether to risk the outdoors became a calculation fraught with hazard. On my last day on the island, restless from being housebound, I went for a morning walk in nearby Woodsman cemetery. The air held a strange amber light, and pink smoke veiled the grave markers at the edge of the forest. I was captivated by the aura of the place, with its moss-covered headstones and weathered statuary dating from pioneer days. As I walked through the dry grass the angels seemed to emerge from the smoke like emissaries from another time. I began to study them and take their portraits.

I am a student of angels, and I had not seen these before. The faces of the little ones captured a blend of innocence and gravity that seemed both timeless and completely of our time. Beauty, grief, mourning, serenity, loss, longing for another time: the combined cataclysm of the fires and the pandemic require a vocabulary all its own. The phrase “smoke elegies” seemed to describe the mood in the air and the bigger moment. I decided then to do a series about the angels, (which got delayed by a journey to Tieton and the beginning of a photographic series of landscapes of the America West – but that’s another story!) Perhaps it is the coming of December, with its dark weather and mystic illuminations, but I woke up a few weeks ago possessed by the image of a winged statue. I decided to drop everything else on my plate and see where this body of work might go.

The archetype of the angel is far from my usual subject matter. Angels for many evoke religious associations, and as a result, for a contemporary artist it can feel precarious to go into this territory. For me angels do not represent religion, but instead act as a universal icon offering comfort, protection, rescue and transcendence. Their form is a devotional shape into which I can pour the unironic emotions of this time of isolation and worldwide loss. The pandemic has taken nearly 1.5 million lives world wide, and for many of those deaths there has been no ceremony of mourning, no bedside visitation, no funeral. A cemetery and the sense of ritual that accompanies it looks very different in the light of this new reality.

Working on these images has been a contemplative and personally transformative process. The angels are built from a slow, painstaking method of collage that has led me on a path to rediscover what it was I saw in the smoke, at the edge of the woods. In the process I have researched the pictorial treatment of angels and marveled at the long fascination they have held for people through history, from ancient Crete to Victorian England all the way up to today’s video gamers in VR headsets. Some of these pieces reference the mourning theorems of American folk art, and others the shrouds of Faiyum. Others embrace Victorian intricacy and that era’s unabashed romance with sorrow. As I have been living with the faces of the angels I have also been living with history, and putting the present difficult moment into a deeper sense of time.

Devotional practice often focuses on one image and repeats it again and again. In my years as a calligrapher and student of Buddhism I might do one character from the Heart Sutra for weeks. In that tradition, I have chosen only a few images, and worked with them in sequence, finding more to understand each time I look at subtle differences in color, texture and context. The result is a series of prints in variant editions. They are created through my unique process of digital assemblage, built up with layer upon layer of subtle surface and color from my photographs and ink painting. All of the prints are available in my shop, in a variety of sizes and prices. For the holiday season, everything in my shop is 20% off through January 2^nd with a minimum purchase.

The collection to date is included here, as the resolution for retina display on WordPress is best in the blog rather than the portfolios. Click on any image to be taken to the listing.

Blue Angel [Read more…]