VOA常速英语:Fire Painting Artist Burns His Art(翻译)

Pete Kephart burns his art.

My mom always said, ‘Don’t play with fire,’ and “I never learned.”

For the past 12 years at his home in the mountains of West Virginia, Kephart has been a fire painter,using fire, water, earth, wind and paint to create abstract designs on paper.

He begins by building a huge bonfire.As it burns down to sizzling cinders, he begins to fire painting on paper using water.

If I paint a circle on a sheet of paper with just water, and I set it on fire, I’ll get a white circle on a brown sheet of paper.

The paper is made from cotton, which is stronger and burns more slowly than paper made of wood pulp.The places where I’m not applying any water, or water-based materials, will begin to burn very, very quickly,while at the same time, all the water or much of the water will still be present in the surface of the paper, and that causes the amazing contrast.

It is supposed to look like a sunset or sunrise with clouds over water.

Kephart is pouring dried earth pigment onto this paper and letting the wind help create the design.The interaction of the elements that I’ve applied to the paper’s surface and the fire itself create entirely new effects.

But the timing is crucial. And each paper needs to be removed within 30 seconds.

One second can make a huge difference between a fantastic, beautiful painting, and something that just burns to nothing, and becomes ash.

Kephart says as far as he knows he is the only artist using this technique.Every painting is a surprise.

He discovered the myth by accident as he was getting rid of some used art paper, says Kephart in his studioThe raindrops fell on a sheet of paper, so when I set the paper on fire, the raindrops preserved these white, bright spots on this brown sheet of paper that had burned.

He works on what he calls his unfinished paintings by drawing on them using pastels.

Some of them turn into nature scenes.

I am seeing a sun with a mountain ridge in the distance, and a river or stream coming down through the center.

Here at the Zenith Gallery in Washington, his creation sells from $1,000 to $7,500.

Kephart’s striking paintings show that destruction can be beautiful.