Artist finds herself drawn to the flames

A forest fire’s horror is equaled only by its extreme beauty. While the aesthetic component of nature’s mesmerizing power is something we can admit to only when we are not in the danger zone, the lure of the imagery is inescapable. As flames rolled through Southern California this month, violent flashes of red, orange and yellow mixed with the thick black smoke, creating a furious mix of color and consumption that defied any sense of rational human control.

The camera loves this stuff -- for TV, movies or still photography. Not only is the story shattering, the drama is immediate. But despite the power of the visual, is there art in it? How, a painter wonders, do you re-create something so cinematic?

Few have dared. Ed Ruscha famously painted “The Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire” in the 1960s and has painted a few other flaming images. The Romantic English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner witnessed the burning of London’s Houses of Parliament in the early 19th century, then went on to chronicle the scene in webs of fantastical color. But forest fires, as common an annual event as any holiday season, are not often the painter’s muse.

Karen Carson became intrigued by this notion last summer, after watching fires set by lightning storms ravage the land around her home in rural Montana. At 60, Carson has a backlog of imagery in her mind, and as the fires stuck with her over the next few months, she challenged herself to come up with a new way to tackle the traditional calling of landscape painting. Over the winter, back at the Venice Beach studio she’s occupied for decades, Carson created the series of drawings and paintings currently on view at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica.

Her canvas became the delicate, untreated silk common in Japanese landscape works, and she enhanced the Asian influence by inserting spooky images of dragons breathing fire at trees. Her highly skilled draftsmanship recalls the speed and motion of action painting, particularly the abstractions of Jackson Pollock at the height of Abstract Expressionism. But throughout this new series of work, forests in the process of being consumed by fire are solidly her subject.

“I’ve never painted in this way,” Carson said in a conversation at her studio as the paintings were being prepared to move to the gallery. The artist has experimented with many painting styles, from abstract assemblage to simple graphic images with text, and this new work may be her most Romantic to date. “I’ve never painted landscapes; I’ve never tried to paint this realistically,” she said. “I began by trying to make them abstract. But when they were abstract, they weren’t scary enough.” Many of these new images are big -- “Double Dragon Fire,” a two-panel work, is more than 14 feet long and nearly 5 feet high. But the pines are still smaller than life-size. Stripped naked of their needles, they appear even more vulnerable than in life.

Carson has lived most of her adult life in urban Los Angeles and New York but was born and raised in rural Oregon. She was seduced to return to the open range when she met her husband, George Wanlass, a rancher and art collector, in 1997. Together, they bought property in Montana, and she began to spend half of each year there -- away from the dense urban neighborhood where she’s done most of her mature work.

She found she loved the sky, and it led her to reexamine 19th century American landscape painting. She hasn’t really fit in with the artists working in Montana, though, most of whom, she said, “won’t compete with nature, because nature is so big.” Shying away from any subject is not her way. “In L.A., we have shrines for dead gang members in my neighborhood, which is terrible. Up there, there’s a dead animal on the road every morning. Or somebody’s been killed in their off-road vehicle. People think it’s beautiful there, but it’s dangerous. Frankly, I find it intimidating. And the only way you can fight back is to make aggressive art out of it.”

Although Carson says she hates the concept of “art as therapy,” she has found that painting provides her with a way of understanding the world. “Every time my life changes, I have to make some sense out of it, and I have to own it, and I have to describe it. And make work of it.”

She chose to work far away from the scenes she was describing, painting the trees as iconic images without distinct features. “I realize I’m making all the same kind of tree,” she said, laughing, “and I grew up with a botanist father, knowing that there are many varieties in the forest. I know the difference between the pine, Douglas fir and the spruce. But for me, it comes down to ‘This is a tree, and that’s enough.’ Half the image is the brushstroke and half is the tree.”

She paints with both stains and acrylics, allowing each stroke to bleed into the silk as she works. There can be no mistakes, however, no retractions, as the silk fabric is unforgiving and the paint surfaces cannot build up the way that they do on a primed canvas. That challenge too is invisible to the viewer, but for those who know how it works, it makes the finished images that much more exciting.

“Because she can’t make a mistake, her incredible draftsmanship is always evident,” says art critic and curator Michael Duncan, who has written extensively on Carson’s work. “She’s the toughest critic of art that I’ve ever met -- both of her own work and others.” The result has been absolute attention to detail. “It’s brought about an incredible rigor in her work,” Duncan says.

A tall, elegant woman with a distinctive sense of her own style, Carson has a sense of humor that often emerges even when she’s talking seriously. Despite her years of teaching painting, and all the hours she’s spent doing it, she says she still finds it a curious activity.

“I love painting for its limitations. I find it’s like a weird riddle. Why would you stand with a stick with hairs on it poking at a piece of fabric? It’s a Don Quixote thing to do, very eccentric.”

She points out that she’s lived through long periods when the art world declared that “painting is dead,” favoring instead the conceptual or the concrete. That trend has reversed now, and Carson is happy that it has. “You look at all the young painters today, and they’re masters. These guys really can paint.”

But while most others are returning to traditional subjects, Carson is looking for the edgy outer limits. “She has an instinct that people used to have in the ‘70s. She will move to the most unfashionable area to test that resistance,” says critic Dave Hickey. “Karen’s pieces always taunt you with ‘Can you deal with this?’ She made giant geometric abstractions at the nadir of their vogue, and then abandoned them when they became fashionable to paint. In a historical sense, by painting forest fires on silk, she’s really valuable. Because the work casts a light back on the network of fashion in the moment.”

Nevertheless, Carson still questions her own choices: “How many people do you think will be mad at me for making something beautiful out of something terrible?” she asked. “I worry about being accused of trying to horn in on a natural disaster. But if you go to the Louvre, you see that they made paintings of war and horrible things. It’s not my job to make kind art, and my work is pretty kind by most standards.” She stopped herself for a moment to think, then spoke with complete assurance. “I think it’s a privilege to make something beautiful out of something horrible.”

*

Karen Carson: ‘Putting Out Fires’

Where: Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica

When: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays; closed Sundays and Mondays

Ends: May 29

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 828-8488