Impressionistic paintings of forest fires

If, after a lost weekend, you find yourself in Prague, Czechoslovakia this month, after checking to be sure you still have your passport, you should visit an exhibition of paintings at the Václav Špála Gallery (map). Yes, that’s right, I said paintings at a gallery. Our regular Wildfire Today readers may be thinking that they don’t remember seeing an art critic’s writings in this space, and they would be correct. I am neither an art critic, nor will I pretend to be one here, but I was intrigued by some paintings by Czech artist Petr Pastrňák who is exhibiting some of his works from his “Burning Forest” series.

The paintings are impressionistic, but undoubtedly represent forest fires. Flames from fires are difficult to duplicate in electronic simulations used for training firefighters, Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) in movies, or in paintings. So an artist might as well go the non-realistic route.

Here is an excerpt from an article about the exhibition, written by Mimi Fronczak Rogers for the Prague Post:

…Raging flames dominate the canvases in Pastrňák’s forests, but there is little sense of impending catastrophe, as the flames often seem like benign campfires. They can also be viewed with less focus on the concrete motif and more attention to the process of painting itself, in which Pastrňák blends techniques of brushing, rolling, splattering and spraying, and in one case even washes over the entire canvas with transparent white so that the painted fire looks masked with a veil of smoke.

Like more traditional forest painters, Pastrňák models his forests using light and dark within a limited color range and with big painterly gestures manages to achieve naturalistic passages that ring true to our own observations of wood fires.

Each painting is different, but there is a strong sense of repetition and a regularity to the rhythm of vertical elements in Pastrňák’s “Burning Forest” and earlier “Forest” series, creating a unified impression of being surrounded by an expressionistic ring of fire. The vertical elements can either have the effect of individual tongues of flames drawing the viewer into an intimate campfire or of flames dramatically shooting up the trunks of tall trees seen from a distance.

The exhibition ends February 27. If you are going to have a painting on your wall, it might as well be an interpretation of a forest fire, right?

Author: Bill Gabbert

After working full time in wildland fire for 33 years, he continues to learn, and strives to be a Student of Fire. View all posts by Bill Gabbert