DRAWING AND PAINT

Even if fire is defined as ‘combustion,’ our attraction to it cannot be so easily delineated.  Practically speaking, fire warms us, it cooks our food, it provides protection against the wilderness and its beasts waiting in the dark to devour us.  Beyond practicality is where the mystery lies, as fire dances and flares and leaps and grows and shrinks at last to glowing embers.  Why do we stare at it, entranced?  Why do we contain it in fireplaces in our homes when central heating provides better protection from winter’s chill?  Because when we admire fire, we admire its mutability, the changeableness that combustion brings to each split second of our vision: blue, purple, yellow, orange, red, all flicker across our retinas and we simply cannot stop absorbing all the spectra from a crackling fire.  Fire art allows us to control an uncontrollable essence, as much as is possible.

All artists desire to affect people, beginning with themselves and radiating outwards to the general public.  As such desires lead to action, the artist who works with fire art directly, physically affects his audience, in that fire warms us and lights our path even as it consumes its fuel.  Fire seems to be as alive as we are, moving and striving upwards to shed our light upon our immediate environment.  When we think of fire art, first and most famous of any fire art exhibitions is the Burning Man public festival, held in the Nevadan desert over Labor Day Weekend.  From its origins as a simple burning log in the midst of one of the most populous cities in California, fire art may be seen as a reminder of our dependence on fire’s energy to change our environment from completely natural to natural with man-made enhancements.  Observing as well as making fire art can be a humbling experience.

Even as fire is alive, it is dangerous.  Harkening back to childhood’s warnings of “Be careful, it’s hot!”, we as observers and adults pride ourselves on our knowledge of fire.  We don’t move too close, we appreciate fire’s true nature without desiring to be branded with its flame.  We do not desire a scar from a fire, we desire only to use fire as self-expression, as rebellion, as a community effort to define that which makes us civilized and to mark our sometimes uncivilized thoughts.

Modern fire art of the sort that stands upon a safe platform and generally forms from a framework is practiced with many different fuels.  Propane is the most common, the gas escaping from the tank shaped by different plumbing fixtures, pressures and nozzles and thus resulting in different flame shapes.  Refining the method even further, controlling how the propane mixes with the oxygen in our air can make a different effect upon the piece.  Adding colorants such as chlorine in powdered form to the flames is even more specialized and needs further safety measures, as colorants may be dangerous to both the artist and audience when breathed in.  These methods emphasize the danger in using fire, its beauty as well as its allure.  We all want to play with fire to some degree, and a fire artist has conquered the means to do so.