Evan Lee: Forest Fire Series

By Vivian Peachey
Instructor: Pete Smith

Evan Lee is part of a group show - In Dialogue with Carr at the Vancouver Art Gallery that runs until January 3, 2011. Along with contemporary artists Douglas Coupland, Liz Magor, and Marianne Nicolson, the artists were ‘to draw out a dialogue between Carr’s legacy and the myriad ways in which artists respond to it”.

Of the many themes broached by the artists, and in dialogue with the work of Carr, the making of a national visual identity and new ways of experiencing our vast and wild Canadian landscape factor significantly in all of the artists work. Acting as a backdrop and featured throughout the show are Carr’s paintings of British Columbia’s energized landscapes featuring Carr’s iconic forests and First Nations totem poles.

Vancouver artist Evan Lee’s offering, are a series of manipulated photograph-paintings described as post-photography. Taking images from the British Columbia Forest Service, Lee prints the photographs onto the wrong side of photographic paper. As such, the pre-determined pigment sits on the surface of the paper and is pushed around with brushes, thus creating a painting.

What results is a third-person interpretation of the fires. The first-person was the person experiencing the expanse and heat of the fire, photographing the image while zipping in and out of the smoke while in their helicopter. The second person would have made decisions on the composition and cropping of the photograph in their darkroom. Lee, third in line, was however safe from the heat, chaos and fear, re-envisioning the fire in his home studio. And in using this technique he has been highly successful. While staying true to the colours of the photograph Lee infuses an impressionistic overlay through his painterly brushwork. His paintings appear as an artist’s sketch, fresh and spontaneous and this is absolutely appropriate given that the subject matter would require agile artistic speed should one try to paint an inferno from life. And this is where it becomes confusing, even a deception. The paintings read as authentic, a pochade, but of course we know this is charade. What becomes apparent as we learn more about the artistic process is that the rapidly executed painting with their elegant brushwork is in fact several layers removed from the heat and smoke.

Through this technique, the process details are lost and an abstracted image emerges over residual marks of edges and form. The images are aesthetically beautiful and atmospheric with their semi monochromatic palette of oranges, black and grey, a lapse in time to Whistler’s mega-landscape paintings. Their relatively small size is the one glaring critique of Lee’s paintings as the subject matter is grandiose and mythic and deserves to be monumental. As Lee writes “scale should be dictated by the subject [and w]ith landscape of course, it is impossible to replicate anything 1:1. I did try other sizes and it came down to how comfortably I could handle the brushwork and how it appears”.

Lee revisits the notion of the Canadian wilderness and the imagery that is created feels timeless, as representative and relevant now as it would have been a century or even ten centuries ago. The new ghostly images are a reminder of an event and through their remaking assume a more authentic reality in portraying that moment. They transcend the photographic record of an event and become even more real than the original. In Evan Lee’s paintings, you can feel the smoke stinging your eyes, feel the radiating heat and hear the forest imploding through its combustion.

Lee’s Forest Fire series are laden with complex messaging - poignant imagery symbolizing our world in chaos. His paintings point the accusatory finger straight back at the viewer. As a viewer you just need to link one causal effect back to the other and the truth lands squarely onto the collective we. We are in part responsible for BC burning, for Australia burning and for all other places where heat and energy are rampaging the earth.

And the connections of course are that winters aren’t cold enough to kill the bark beetle that in turn reek havoc in conifer stands, which then jump a mountain or two spreading eastward causing more chaos. When fire does strike, the quantity of fibre from the dead and dying trees create a deep burn that spreads widely, instead of giving a nutrient releasing superficial burn that would otherwise rejuvenate forests. All this is coupled with reduced cyclical rainfall and a historic policy of fire suppression. We have created a tinderbox. And looping back to the first causal effect - warmer and drier winters, we do not have to go far to answer why this is occurring.

Lee’s emblematic forest fire series are a re-envisioning and reconstruction of BC’s forests and they cleverly replicate the complex synchronic side step that is playing out on a national and global level by individuals and politicians. Lee’s paintings symbolize our new reality where collectively we are wiping out the complexities and re-articulating our path forward. Through pairing contradictory realities – destruction vs. beauty; authenticity vs. reality; original vs. borrowed; analog vs. digital; handmade vs. mechanically reproduced; and singularity vs. multiplicity, Lee has provided a space for us to engage in an honest discussion.

Vivian Peachey has worked in the field of forest certification for the past 13 years and is a part-time drawing and painting major in her second year at OCADU.