The Garden — Page 2 — Iskra Fine Art

A Meditation on August as Drought Comes to the Pacific Northwest

August 20, 2015 by Iskra Leave a Comment

I have recently begun writing on Medium. Today I have published a piece about the garden, and what it is like to be a caretaker of Eden when global warming turns everything upside down. Here is an excerpt, with new artwork done in homage to the magnolia. I hope you will visit Medium to read the entire essay and share with friends, gardeners, and anyone looking for ways to think about living in this time of drastic change.

magnolia mixed media on plaster by Iskra Fine Art — Magnolia, mixed media on plaster © Iskra Johnson

What is resilience? This is the question I ask myself hourly in the summer the West is on fire.

It is August. Poppies and cosmos intermingle, their ungainly stalks eye-high and lassooed with string. The distance shimmers in incense. The air is thick, and sound travels and bends slowly around corners. Even airplanes seem different, with the lazy small propeller sounds of a slower century. August defies the laws of breathing. You can exhale and stay there, moving neither forward nor back. Look at the dogs, and the lawn, indistinguishably golden and bleached, panting, lolling, wordless. Be like them. Walk barefoot into the garden at dawn in a long white dress and feel the stubble against your toes. There will be only one cool moment before evening and it is now.

I stand for hours with the garden hose, saving what trees I can before rationing begins. The ground dampens quickly but after months of heat I am no longer fooled. I can sink my fingers into the dirt and know it will be bone dry. When dirt changes character and no longer knows how to receive, the scientists call it hydrophobic. The garden hose and watering can, these symbols of all things fecund and generous and regenerative, have met their match. [Read more…]

In Defense of the Back Yard: Urban Density and Urban Eden

May 13, 2015 by Iskra 5 Comments

If I start this little essay with a Latin name will you stop reading? If I say “cornus controversa” for instance? I could say “dogwood” of course, but since this piece is not about dogs and only indirectly about “wood” why not go bold, if obscure? Common names can be so misleading, rather like those movie reviews which prevent you from weeping at the heroine’s tragic fate because in the back of your mind you keep hearing the movie was just a “tear-jerker.” I sometimes catch myself wondering if my favorite tree is really as beautiful as I think, or if it is in fact just a frantic panting mess, a dog slobbering on my knees and ripping up the Irish Moss. But then I go back to rolling its proper title under my tongue.

As in, “the other morning I had my back turned to the cornus controversa when I heard a sound of wings.” [Read more…]

August

August 16, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Sometime in the last week August remembered itself and began changing. This is not a month obvious with new beginnings. It doesn’t announce itself with bright resolutions or an accounting of all that has been figured out. It writes itself in twigs and sprinkler water. It explodes from its own fullness: the split pod, the swollen tomato, the echinacea’s violet paper bent back like wings from a gilded heart.

It’s all too much.

I stand barefoot in my nightgown, yellow grass harsh against my toes and watch the sky grow pink in early morning. The house, unused to sun-colored earth, seems to float. Are there things to do? Did I have ambition? It melts into one impulse: to walk through the garden with my arms full of poppies, to shake them until their dry rattle is all I can hear.

Photography and text © Iskra Johnson

Impermanence Study No.17: The Dragonfly

June 20, 2013 by Iskra 2 Comments

Impermanence Study No.17 (Dragonfly), © Iskra Johnson, Archival Pigment print, 16″ x 16″

This time of year the pond is dizzy with dragonflies. They hover in a cloud of iridescent blue, migrating from the waterlilies to the yellow poppies, and I have even seen them in the house, poised over the threshold of the front door. When I found the body of a checkered dragonfly on a lily pad last July I started this piece, which is now in its 17th iteration. Maybe you call that a …..”series.” Collage is the art of decision– and indecision. It is the ultimate practice of impermanence, as any element can be moved at any time to create a new shift in perception. If, in your own dragon-fly hovering, you begin to doubt and become anxious for resolution, you lose sight of the wonder that illuminates the process. I am influenced lately by a provocative book by Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. I read this when it first came out in 1994, but had not consciously thought about it for years. The new edition includes black and white photographs that elucidate each premise with quiet and subversive elegance. This passage uses the garden as metaphor, but could as easily refer to making art or any other creative endeavor: All things are incomplete. All things, including the universe itself, are in a constant, never-ending state of becoming or dissolving. Often we arbitrarily designate moments, points along the way, as “finished” or “complete.” But when does something’s destiny finally come to fruition? Is the plant complete when it flowers? When it goes to seed? When the seeds sprout? When everything turns into compost? The notion of completion has no basis in wabi-sabi. Of course, Edna St. Vincent Millay also said, “To create one must decide.” And the challenge is to hold both truths and not go crazy. I find it helps to work until midnight, when things get very quiet, to a certain kind of music. The artist of the snuff bottle, on the other hand, had not the luxury of indecision. Bottles like this one were painted with tiny brushes from the inside of the bottle. Ponder that feat of execution next time you think you have a technical challenge.

Through A Glass Darkly Dragonfly Snuffbottle print — Through a Glass Darkly (Impermanence Study No. 12), ©Iskra Johnson, archival pigment print, 16″ x 16″

Soundtrack: Darshan Ambient, anything by Michael Allison. Or Catching Up to You. Or Sidney Ji’s meditative Water Sines.

The Parrot Tulip, a Drawing for Easter

March 31, 2013 by Iskra 1 Comment

Tulips For Easter Mixed Media Drawing — “Parrot Tulips, Easter,” pencil and powdered pigment © Iskra Johnson

Last night I went for a long walk on Easter Eve. I came home at dusk and sat by the pond in the near dark to watch the dogwood tree. It has just this year fulfilled its promise. Every branch but one holds the shape of embrace so characteristic of cornus, and at the end of each twig is the spring-shaped tear which doubles as a single hand, reaching towards the sky. If I were more Japanese I might fret over the wrong branch that sprouts with no awareness of proper social skills or courtesy or the long tradition of arboreal beauty straight up in the midst of graceful arcs. I might know what to do with it and stand for an hour with my honed shears and change this tree’s life.

But the beauty of sitting in the dark is that there is no work to do. At dusk I have no pruning shears, no hoe and no spade. All I can do is sit helpless surrounded by a garden being its untamed self. In one ear the gargoyle spouts a water melody and in the other traffic starts and stops and purrs the comfort and annoyance of civilization. Between the two a flock of some kind of bird drifts overhead with the sounds of ripples beseeching. I cannot locate these birds by continent or season; their mysterious v-shaped song makes a wake between pond and highway and leaves me in a place of perfect peace.

This morning light dazzles every wall. I will set the table with ceremonial bowls and offer bright colors to the day.