Feeling Through Fire: Part 2 - 'Melancholic Beauty'

“Art is the most beautiful of all the human endeavors. It can express the inexpressible and reveal what is hidden to the eye.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, poet, playwright, scientist

In a white-walled studio in Brooklyn, New York, Greg Lindquist dabs a paintbrush against a linen surface, adding a fluorescent yellow highlight to a swath of rusty orange. Each brushstroke is an interpretive dance, acting out the drama of the wildfire the artist is painting.

The actual fire burned in Western Montana, 2,000 miles from Brooklyn, but the flames in Lindquist’s painting are imbued with the character of a true wildfire. The orange and yellow paint swallows the rest of the piece with the same personification as flames consuming a landscape, and in the same way wildland firefighters describe the irrefutable awe of witnessing a burn: It’s hard to look away.

This piece, completed earlier this year and titled “fuel, heat and oxygen (natural disasters, unnatural beginnings, Montana wildfire),” references the three elements needed for fire to exist, known as the “fire triangle.” The painting is part of a series of wildfire artworks Lindquist started in 2022 that not only depicts iconic burns in the West, but also seeks to capture the emotional complexity inherent in these events. It challenges viewers to explore that space.

“A lot of my work has asked the question, ‘How do you make these invisible forces visible and in a way that people want to think about them?’” said Lindquist, whose work is largely rooted in themes of social and environmental justice and ecology. It’s a task that art has a certain capacity to uphold: shedding light on the space between words.

As wildfires increase in frequency and intensity, artists of all kinds—from painters like Lindquist to photographers and writers—are harnessing art’s power of expressing the inexpressible to explore our vast, and sometimes dichotomous, emotional relationship to wildfire.

Lindquist isn’t from the West, the region of the U.S. where wildfire is most prominent, yet his adoption of wildland fire as a subject is squarely aligned with the themes connecting all his art: the use of beauty as a Trojan horse to inspire people to contemplate ecological disasters. In addition to his wildfire collection, this is especially mirrored in a project in which he incorporated actual coal ash in the work to first mimic the transfixing effect of the material in water, and ultimately create space for the audience to consider events where coal ash was spilled into rivers, like that which occurred in his home state of North Carolina in 2014. Fire offers a similar viewing trajectory, where striking colors invite the eye, yet the depth of the subject keeps the audience engaged beyond their simple visual experience. 

“What I'm making is something that's trying to reinvestigate and trying to upend and represent what disasters can be,” he said.

In earlier work, Lindquist captured industrial decay in the process of gentrification, particularly on the Brooklyn waterfront. In an interview with photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier about the project, Lindquist said: “I am aestheticizing these landscapes because I see a certain melancholic beauty in their loss—painting certainly heightens that effect. Am I romanticizing? Yes. To what end? To seduce the viewer, to engage him or her in a more complex context about the landscape’s political, economic, and conceptual underpinnings.”

This embrace of contradiction—melancholic beauty—is something Lindquist hopes to capture in his renditions of the burning landscapes of the West as much as he did in the urban landscapes along New York’s East River. The former is less familiar to him, despite a recent vacation to Red Lodge, Montana. But Lindquist believes that unlike with his coal ash project that focused on one ecological disaster, he’s working with a subject that is universally compelling.   

“Fire is elemental,” he said. “We all have a relationship with it.” He recalled June of last year, when smoke from Quebec, Canada, overtook New York skies, shocking East Coasters with a proximity to wildfire that’s become a reality for much of the West. For Lindquist, art is a way to grapple with the complexity of wildfire, but it’s also a way to share that battle with others.

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Lindquist’s art transcends distance, but the work of poet Chris La Tray is firmly supplanted in the prairie junegrass and ponderosa forests of western Montana. La Tray, who currently serves as Montana Poet Laureate, is a member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He doesn’t remember wildfire being central to growing up in Frenchtown, Montana, a stark contrast from the predictably smoky summers of today. And he laments it.

“Summer [has] become this thing that I dread,” said La Tray, whose memoir was published in August. “It's become my least favorite season because of the impact that smoke and all of that can have on day-to-day life.”

During his interview with Mountain Journal, La Tray was strapped to think of specific writing he’s done related to wildfires, however a quick search through his Substack newsletter, An Irritable Métis, confirmed wildfire to be as pervasive in his writing as it had become in his life. Several newsletters spanning the last few years echo the “ominous horror” with which he’s characterized the West’s increasing wildfires, unknowingly stitching together a narrative of despondence.

In the introduction to a newsletter published this July, he wrote:

“We are in the depths of summer right now in Western Montana and it has been a grim one. We’ve been enduring a stretch of hot weather – high 90s, low 100s – with no break in sight. Meanwhile we are under a pall of smoke from wildfires from communities distant and near; a couple are burning just on the edge of the Missoula valley. Air quality is ‘unhealthy.’ We are under a heat advisory, an air quality advisory, and a ‘red flag warning’ for conditions that will result in ‘critical fire weather conditions.’ It’s hard to be upbeat about anything ... ”

La Tray first gained recognition for his book One Sentence Journal, a collection of single-sentence poems he published in 2018. In an Irritable Métis newsletter from June of 2023, he shared a sentence he’d written each day in May, including this one from May 17: “First wave of the year’s wildfire smoke blows in from the north, an unwelcome portent of the months to come.”

The emotions La Tray expresses in writing about wildfire can’t simply be chalked up to inconvenient summer smoke. To him, the annual combustion of the West represents tragedies of our time bigger than any single burn.

“I think fire is just a symptom of what the larger problem is,” he said during the interview. “How we've kind of decided that we know better than the land, how to take care of it.” He references America’s history of fire management, which for decades in the 20^th century mandated immediate suppression of all fires, a tactic that has since been revealed to exacerbate trends of increasing wildfire already enflamed by climate change. A University of Montana study published in March found in a simulation that suppression of all wildfires caused areas to burn three to five times faster over time relative to a world with no suppression.

“[It’s] the horror of knowing all of that land is being burned in a way that's not natural,” he said. “You know that we've created that situation. To me, it's just a constant reminder of our arrogance and our failure to recognize the role that we play in the world, as part of the world, not something separate.”

It’s a reality La Tray refuses to make peace with. His art laments, but he also hopes it can affect some shift in the paradigm of a world on fire.

“The role of art for me more and more is … speaking truth to power,” he said.

La Tray and Lindquist are separated by experience, and by the near entire length of a singeing country, but they both create work that inspires something shared—whether to galvanize, or to remind us of our common relationship to the land.

In an Irritable Métis newsletter from September 21, 2022, La Tray contemplates the moments that do give him peace:

“The smoke has cleared and the light is magnificent, even at its palest hint on the eastern horizon when I first venture out to the back deck to watch …

“Perhaps you too might find peace in this changing light, whether it is filtering through the changing colors of our trees, reflecting off the surface of a river (as it was the Clark Fork earlier today for me) or in how it may highlight the features of someone you hold dear. This is a good time to tell the world and everyone in it that you appreciate them, that you love them. That you are happy you have made it through the summer with them.”

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