Playing with Fire: Spazuk’s Flame-Painted Portraits

It’s one of the first lessons we’re taught as kids: don’t play with fire. It burns, it’s dangerous, and, generally speaking, it’s a destructive force. But artistSteven Spazuk willfully ignored that old adage when he discovered how to use fire— and burn paper— to create breathtakingportraits.

“It’s a little embarrassing,” Spazuk confesses, but the whole idea came to him in a dream: he found himselfstanding in a gallery looking at a black-and-white landscape that he intuitively knew had been painted with fire — and how. “In the morning when I woke up, I remembered the dream and started to experiment.”

Spazuk works by holding a piece of paper overhead and using the flame from a candle or small torch to create trails of soot underneath the paper. He then uses a whole host of tools from paint brushes, to X-Acto blades, to feathers to etch images out of the soot. Spazuk works on intuition, allowing the movement and shapes suggested to him by the soot to drive his etching process. “Working with soot is like working with chance itself,” he explains, “the path the soot takes is as random as the path a fish takes in the water or a bird in the air.”

Ornothotem, 2014, soot on paper

(Steven Spazuk)

Beluga 4, 2014, soot on paper, 20 x 14 in.

(Steven Spazuk)

The practical concern of having to hold the paper over his head while working with a flame keeps his canvas size relatively small — many of his pieces fall in the 20 x 14 inches category. But that hasn’t kept Spazuk from working on a grand scale. The artisthas a whole series of wall-sized fragmentation paintings made up of hundreds of smaller pieces. He puts the same personal, meticulous details into these larger works. For instance, he made brusheswith the hair his wife Danielle lost during chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer to make this portrait of her.

Danielle 3

(Steven Spazuk)

There’s another practical challenge involved and that’s preserving the soot. “The biggest challenge in the beginning was to keep the drawings intact,” Spazuk says.After a great deal of testing with different types of fixatives and spray varnishes, Spazuk has it mastered, “You need a really fine spray and you need to shoot at a certain distance.”

Video: Spazuk at work