The Ink Floor: Collaboration with Iskra Johnson

Sunday, 15 August 2010

This summer at ICON6 I met lettering artists and illustrator Iskra Johnson for the first time. The energy and elegance of her work has held my attention for many years, but I'd yet to meet her. We had a conversation about inspiration, artistic process, and the challenges of making art as spiritual expression in the midst of commerce and career. At the center of this dialog was the theme of making marks authentic to our own stories. Iskra's work is a showcase of this, so the thoughts of working together was intriguing.

In early August we spent a day in Iskra's Seattle studio with the goal of learning from one another's emotional and physical processes of putting marks down on paper. Our respective languages of the figure and the alphabet were evident, however we both made a point to simply attack (my description) the paper without preconceived ideas of content, and see what came.

Some of the results are cataloged below, as well as on Iskra's blog - alphabetroadtrip.typepad.com. Artistic collaboration is a rare thing in the solitary practice of illustration, so we are both feeling energized by this first experiment and are mapping out the territory for Ink Floor v.2.