art beat / By Katherine Almy

Season of Fire

Paintings and photos from this summer’s wildfires

(Nov. 26, 2008)  This past summer, for days on end, I looked up at the night sky and saw the moon glowing red. From the perspective of humans, the fires that created that red moon were among the worst on record, with nearly 300 square miles burned and 16 firefighters killed. The roaring flames were relatively short-lived compared to the lasting pall of smoke and ash, and the burned trees that will scar the landscape for years to come.

Personally, I found it a bit depressing to see that altered moon every night for weeks, but that’s because I was looking at it from a self-centered viewpoint. On the grander scale, fire is as much about renewal as it is destruction. I take that back — fire is much more about renewal than it is destruction. The burning lasts for hours, or maybe days, but the renewal starts right away and continues at a remarkable pace, for many years to come. The cycle of birth and death is as much a part of the landscape as is each individual animal that resides in it.

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Two artists who decided to look at the fires with a broader lens than mine went inland last summer to see what images they could capture, and the results of that trip are on display at the Umpqua Community Gallery in Arcata. They call the show Season of Fire.

Michael Harris and Ken Jarvela have been friends since high school and have worked together many times. Neither had too many expectations when they went out; they just wanted to see what they could come up with. The two men are intimately familiar with the local wilderness, having painted (in Ken’s case) and photographed (in Michael’s) here throughout their careers. The idea, in going out to the fires, was to see a new dimension of the landscape.

What they came up with is more than a little surprising. The word fire evokes images of roaring flames, people shouting, animals fleeing in wide-eyed terror, chaos. But these images are peaceful. There are no flames in any of the pictures. The reason for this was primarily circumstantial: The artists could not get close enough to the fires without being a nuisance to the crews of firefighters. They had to do their work from a distance. But the result is far more powerful than what they might have achieved otherwise, and this power came from breaking the rules.

Artists learn in beginning art classes that contrast is the key to creating visual interest. If there is not enough difference between the darkest darks and the lightest lights, your painting or photograph will be bland and uninteresting. But once you’ve mastered the rules, you can break them, as Ken and Michael do in this show. Some of the works are almost painfully tight, as far as contrast level goes, and the tension created provides far more interest than images of flames ever could.

The low contrast works here because this is exactly the information that the artists would have had to work with. Indeed, for Ken, it must have been all he could do not to try to introduce more color and variation, because the process of reproducing the endless shades of gray must have been tedious. But he took no shortcuts and gave us the full effect of the all-pervasive smoke. Indeed, at the opening reception, I heard one woman remark that when she looked at the images, she could smell the smoke.

Ken’s painting, Red Sun Reflection, is an example of the subtlety of his work. In it, the river courses down a narrow canyon. The only hint of the nearby fire is the light reflected in the water. Through the smoke, the light is a dull red. “And,” Ken told me, “the design of those reflections reminded me of flames. That’s about as close as any of those images come to having flames in ’em.”

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