My big hope would be that if people change their aesthetic perceptions around wildfire, maybe we can start using it again as a tool to help prevent these catastrophic fires that we have.
Wildfires Beyond Western Narrative: Ashes of Renewal | Erika Osborne
Rooted in a deep connection to the natural world, artist and Professor of Painting at Colorado State University Erika Osborne explores the dynamic relationship between fire, landscapes, and ecological change in her work. Through vivid depictions of wildfire-scarred forests and the renewal that follows, her paintings challenge the dominant Western narrative that views fire solely as a force of destruction. The traditional, romanticised portrayals of wilderness are redefined through incorporating the social, cultural, economic, and scientific layers within her paintings.
Her latest show, The Love Language of Fire at Visions West Contemporary Gallery invites viewers to engage with the complexities of wildfire management, confronting themes of destruction, regeneration, and the ever-shifting interplay between humans and the natural world. By integrating elements of science, history, and activism, her work encourages a deeper understanding of fire’s complexity and its place within the broader environmental discourse.
Natural landscapes have been prevalent throughout your career as a painter; has this been a conscious or unconscious choice? What do you think influenced your affinity for capturing these scenes? Is this something that is linked back to your childhood or upbringing?
I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is in a valley surrounded by the Rocky Mountains and the Wasatch Front. I lived at the base of one of the many canyons and my parents hiked, skied and did a lot of trips down to the desert. It seemed like everybody was kind of outdoorsy in Salt Lake City; for fun on a weekend in the summer, we’d hike up to a lake and camp out. We had a lot of freedom and access to that kind of environment. My father valued the natural world and took us out in it quite a bit. I have aunts and uncles who are professional artists and great-grandmothers who were artists. My mother saw my interest in painting and drawing and put me in after-school art classes, taking any opportunity for me to learn to be a painter. Basically, painting and drawing are where I put my focus.
I still have my first watercolour painting from when I was seven or eight; it’s of a tree, in my daughter’s room right now. It’s funny because trees have kind of been a focal point in my work. I always gravitated to the natural world for my own rejuvenation and recreation.
Landscape art often romanticises untouched wilderness. Through your work, do you intend to disrupt or reinterpret these historical depictions?
For a long time I was making mostly what one might consider traditional landscape paintings. I was out of undergrad, selling that, maybe on that route to just being an artist that could make a living. Though I was always in conflict because I was like an activist too.
I was painting these idealised Western landscapes and I started asking myself questions like, Why do you feel the need to take these power lines out? Why are you not acknowledging the road? Why didn’t you include those beetle-kill trees? We’re fed something, especially in the Western United States, that stems back to the first painters that ever came out here.
Then photographs, postcards, and hobby artists that make Western paintings. I was just regurgitating what I knew. At that moment, I decided to make a change in my work. So, yes, I hope that my work since has put into question the romanticised Western landscape.
You were part of the Land Art in America program at the University of New Mexico working as a master student when we met. How has this program based around creating out of the studio and in landscapes transformed how and what you create?
My passion for the natural world beyond its use as a resource and the tension between these more idealised landscapes actually sent me off to graduate school. I applied for a couple of graduate schools, but I was really excited about the University of New Mexico because it had a focus on getting out. A focus on place-based making and relationships not just to aesthetic ideals but also all the cultural constructs, history, politics and science that’s wrapped up in that.
I went with the question, How can I be both a painter of landscape and do it in a way that acknowledges the complexity of landscape?
Your recent exhibition, “The Love Language of Fire” features paintings depicting the cycle of life and death in wildfire burn scars. What has been the underlying motivation to investigate and explore this theme?
I’ve always connected with the plant world, even as a younger person, like, I didn’t need a dog or a cat, but I needed trees. What’s been interesting to me over the years is that need for trees and plants, and specifically conifers and pines of the Desert Southwest and Intermountain West. It was my interest in them as entities that opened the door for talking about the natural world in all of its complexity.
We love trees; they’re part of our creation stories; we consider them wise beings in a lot of our theologies and mythologies. At the same time, we cut them down, you know, ad nauseam.
Yesterday there was an executive order from Trump to start clear-cutting again; they’re also economic, something that we use as a material. Forests started to become kind of a microcosm for me of these bigger, more complex issues that the environment is facing around the globe, like climate change, deforestation, wildfires, recreation—all these things link up in many ways. The urban wildlands interface, with the history of these forests and forest management, were layers on top of the landscape for me. I would look at a forest and see it was a repository for all of this interaction between humans and the natural world in all of its complexity. Forests have always been of importance for me in my work; they thread through almost my whole entire practice.
Given the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires, the recent devastation in L.A. How do you see your work engaging with the broader conversations on climate change and fire management policies?
I was already interested in fire, and you can’t ignore wildfires in the last decade. After doing some work up at the University of California Berkeley Field Station just north of Lake Tahoe, at Sagehen Creek, I started to understand forest management complexity. All that has happened over the last 100 plus years has created the forest as it is today. I have always seen this as beautiful and healthy. You associate the way things were in your past with the natural world as healthy—when in reality, it is not. You associate the way things were in your past with the natural world as healthy; your memories of happiness and joy are kind of wrapped up in them. Yet, the forests that I have known in my lifetime are so unhealthy—they are either way too dense or they are monoculture plantations—certainly in parts of the US, especially the Northwest and central Rockies.
The way our forests look now is a result of some bad decisions in forest policy. In the 1910s and 1920s, they started to instigate this idea, which became a formal policy of the Forest Service. They called it the 10am policy, where they would put wildfires out, regardless of where they were burning, by 10am the day after it was reported. It’s great for a town or a village that’s close to a forest, and not so great for wilderness areas that have species of trees and vegetation that have literally evolved with fire. Lodgepole Pine cones only open when they’re heated to high temperatures with a fire, so seeds are only dispersed after a fire. The Ponderosa bark has a particular thickness so that it can handle low-burning fire.
The Forest Service started to put out all fires, meaning we have really dense forests. The natural beetles that often do good work in the forest can jump all over the place as the trees are so close together and suddenly we have this problem, right? We’ve got 70% of the trees in the Colorado forests that are dead, and if you put a fire through that, you’re going to get a megafire.
Much of your work highlights not just the devastation of wildfires but also the regrowth that follows. The dominant western narrative views fire as a disaster, yet it is also an essential part of ecosystem restoration. Are you aiming to challenge or expand public perceptions of fire through your art?
In 2020, just out my back door, Colorado experienced its largest wildfire in history, which nearly matched the second-largest wildfire in Wyoming’s history. Three megafires occurred in the same area—right in my backyard—during the pandemic. I had already been interested in the idea that part of the problem is our inability to accept wildfire or use it as a tool in prescribed burns and cultural burning. Some of my favourite wilderness areas were burnt in 2020. I felt like I had to find a way to reengage with those spaces with an open mind.
What I found is that so much of our problem with fire is an aesthetic one; we want our forests to look the way they always have because we have memories and associations tied to those spaces or people have homes in those spaces. They don’t want to thin the forest around them or have a prescribed burn through there because it changes the aesthetics of the environment.
The last several years I’ve spent my summers walking through these burn scars in Colorado, Oregon, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to see what it actually looks like, and what I’ve noticed is an incredible proliferation of life; oftentimes it starts with the flowers and the ground cover.
The reason why I decided to make the paintings in that show was to try to capture the beauty of the forest floor. It is truly beautiful, full of colour, full of life; there’s a certain amount of hope in it. My big hope would be that if people change their aesthetic perceptions around wildfire, maybe we can start using it again as a tool to help prevent these catastrophic fires that we have. We can put fire through our landscapes like humans have done in this region for millennia. Maybe we can do it in a way that is beneficial instead of detrimental. That’s where these works come from.
You have developed interdisciplinary field courses like “Art and Environment” and “Art in Forest Ecosystems” at Colorado State University. What inspired you to create these programs? And how do you think they impact students’ understanding of art’s role in environmental discourse?
I have taught field-based, exploratory or expeditionary programs like these for 20 years. I do it because they are incredibly impactful. The most common phrase that students use to describe these experiences is “life-changing.” The world is a big place, especially for college-age kids. it’s really fun to be able to expose them to all of this new information in the places that are impacted directly and have them respond to that creatively. Students form communities of artists and friends that they maintain relationships with forever. It’s so important to make work in response to the world, and even better when you can truly get your hands dirty!
Your work often examines how humans connect culturally to their environments. How have these themes in your artwork evolved, particularly in response to the growing discourse on climate change and environmental degradation?
I think it’s always evolving; there’s always new information; things are always kind of changing. What helps me is to locate that physically in space and time. So I’m finding myself working more in particular locations, and those are like a constant sort of microcosm for these bigger issues that don’t just face the forest but also face the entire planet. That makes sense as a nice balance of always taking in new information as well as kind of grounding it in a physical environment.
The raw textures of charred landscapes and the vivid hues of post-fire renewal are evident in your paintings. What techniques do you use to convey the sensory experience of a burnt environment? Are these landscapes painted after being on site, or are they from drawing upon previous memories and experiences?
For the paintings in Love Language of Fire, they’re me going out and then photographing, getting down on the ground. I work from photographs, although they morph and twist a little bit, but I tend to sort of do these long walks up high, and I have done some plein air work out in the field too. I take all the photos there of particular places that I visit and things that I’ve actually seen. You can also draw from somebody else’s photographs, but being on site actually comes from your own sensory experience of being in the space.
It’s the most important part being out in the field, having experiences and letting that percolate with all the information, statistics, science and politics; together, it creates the work.
We all live in an interconnected ecosystem, and our stories are inseparable. Do you consider your practice to embody this universal approach?
I do. It’s like when you read a good piece of literature that sticks around for eons; it’s because the story is both specific to a particular person or a particular narrative, but it’s also universal. I ground work in a particular location, which is very specific, but the concepts and content, the stories and the interconnectedness of that place are so profound. It’s bigger than all of us; it’s bigger than this space all the time that it’s actually in.
Words by Erika Osborne
Introduction and Interview by Anna Borrie
