Artist Uses Black Carbon Soot From A Live Flame To Create Amazing Works Of Art

2 min


Can you paint without colors? Yes, you can! This amazing artist has been doing it for the past 16 years! He’s Steven Spazuk and he creates delightfully delicate work on canvas using black carbon soot from a flame. No wonder he’s called the ‘fire artist’. He calls his technique ‘fumage’.

Spazuk’s technique involves trailing his tools over the remnants of a flame and creating his works with the resulting carbon soot. His pet subjects are birds, animals, insects, and various kinds of flora. Through his black soot impressions, he also tries to highlight the degradation being caused to our natural world. He shares on cbc.ca, “We need to go back to that idea that we’re part of a system and this ecosystem needs every part of it, so we cannot tolerate any extinction.”

This French -Canadian artist rightly claims he didn’t invent his signature technique, which has been around for centuries. In fact, the surrealist painter, Wolfgang Paalen, used it in the 1930s. Whereas this painter applied soot to oil-based paints in his works, Spazuk uses carbon soot directly from the flames. With the help of a candle or a burning torch, he singes the surface of paper or canvas and makes his art with the soot marks that are left behind.

If you think this process is easy, think again. It requires a trained hand to guide the flame on the surface of paper or canvas, lest it burns. After this, the soot is carefully scratched and removed to reveal the creation. For colored compositions, acrylic paint is applied to the canvas, before ‘smoking’ it with fire.

Spazuk was always interested in art since his childhood days. However, the idea of using carbon soot for art came to him in a dream and prompted him to develop his fumage technique. He honed his skill in creating art by means of smoke-like markings.

The uniqueness of this technique has certainly caught the imagination of the public. In fact, filmmaker Alexander Desouza has even made a short documentary about Spazuk’s fumage process. His works have been displayed in many solo and group exhibitions.








Steven Spazuk

Website | Instagram | Facebook


Like it? Share with your friends!

Comments

comments

Deepak Mehla

Participant

Working on building tools that will help people find quality content on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., so they can spend less time scrolling through the feeds and more time discovering new things!

What's Your Reaction?

fun fun
0
fun
hate hate
0
hate
confused confused
0
confused
fail fail
0
fail
Cute
0
Cute
LOL
0
LOL
Love
0
Love
OMG
0
OMG
Win
0
Win
WTF
0
WTF
Angry
0
Angry
Cry
0
Cry
Geeky
0
Geeky
Choose A Format
Personality quiz
Series of questions that intends to reveal something about the personality
Trivia quiz
Series of questions with right and wrong answers that intends to check knowledge
Poll
Voting to make decisions or determine opinions
Story
Formatted Text with Embeds and Visuals
List
The Classic Internet Listicles
Countdown
The Classic Internet Countdowns
Open List
Submit your own item and vote up for the best submission
Ranked List
Upvote or downvote to decide the best list item
Meme
Upload your own images to make custom memes
Video
Youtube and Vimeo Embeds
Audio
Soundcloud or Mixcloud Embeds
Image
Photo or GIF
Gif
GIF format