The firekeeper: Jesse Littlebird’s ‘Meditations on Fire,’ an artistic rebirth

After tens of thousands of years of human art, how do artists make anything new? They might think they need to use new technologies or discover never-before-painted subjects. But in 1895, the postimpressionist artist Paul Cézanne set out to “astonish Paris with an apple.” Using traditional oil paints, he made a commonplace fruit seem exciting. And just last week at Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, Jesse Littlebird astonished me with paintings of fire.

Each background of his “Meditations on Fire” series is a color field “altar” of Mark Rothko or Josef Albers-style rectangles, on top of which he paints bright flames that sizzle and spark with élan vital. The colors of the flames often come straight from the tube — surprising colors sometimes, like white and blue — and the brushwork is spontaneous, unpredictable and raw. I have been racking my brain trying to think of anything like it, but fire-themed art is actually quite rare — more on this later — and Littlebird’s improvisational approach, more expressionistic than his previous work, feels highly original.

I know Littlebird and even attended the memorial service in October for his father, the artist and storyteller Larry Littlebird, to whom the new paintings are dedicated. Jesse Littlebird began the fire paintings as a way of processing his grief, but, in so doing, discovered a new painterly freedom.

Do I know Littlebird too well to write about his work? I don’t think so, although that’s a legitimate question, and one I’ve been wrestling with. The art world is so small — especially in New Mexico — that any critic is bound to become friends, or frenemies, with most of the major players eventually. If I were to recuse myself from critiquing anyone I got to know socially, I’d either have to avoid socializing with artists altogether or stick to writing about dead artists, neither of which is very practical. Critiquing the work of people we consider friends is an unavoidable occupational hazard for critics everywhere, and different critics take different approaches to the problem. The worst approach is probably the one taken by the 20th century art critic Clement Greenberg, who always insisted his “verdicts of taste” were objectively true, even when he was deeply enmeshed, sometimes financially, with the artists he wrote about. I have no financial stakes in Littlebird’s success; I just like him as a person. And, unlike Greenberg, I freely admit that my reviews are subjective.

How does knowing Littlebird color my view of his work anyway? Because I know him, I know the art comes from a place of sincerity. But I think I would have picked up on that just from reading the beautiful series of personal meditations he wrote for the exhibition catalog. Knowing him gives me some insight into his relationship with his father as well, but not much more than he reveals in those writings.

The paintings themselves are naked and vulnerable. Each is a spontaneous performance, and you can see him trying out new techniques and ideas each time. He scribbles, he scumbles, he lets the oil paint streak or glob or break and fragment. Nothing repeats. Nothing is mannered. There’s no formula and no rules.

“Meditations on Fire No. 1” is probably the most traditional — large tongues of orange and yellow flames that get smaller and featherier as they escape into the sky. But many of Littlebird’s fires have white, blue and purple in them. Many combine palette knife effects, jagged oil pastel stripes and wavy lines. He’s not going for naturalism. In “Meditations on Fire No. 41,” the fire looks like a floral still life with bushy red chrysanthemums. In “Meditations on Fire No. 7,” I see an abstracted sorcerer casting a spell, or a phoenix waving a blueish-burgundy wing. As humans, we are hardwired to see patterns in nature — a phenomenon known as pareidolia — which means the images you see in Littlebird’s fires may not be the same ones I see, but you’ll likely see something. If you continue meditating on the flames, you can see all sorts of images. I chose to consciously will away these phantoms until I could see the fires simply as fires — and then, eventually, pure paint.

It’s not unusual for artists to turn to elemental themes in the wake of a major loss. When the erotic photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s wife died, for instance, he started photographing clouds. In Littlebird’s case, fire was entwined with memories of his father, who had taught him how to be a firekeeper at Pueblo ceremonies.

What I like most about the “Meditations on Fire” is that they’re personal without being literal. He could have simply painted portraits of his dad, but instead, he found a timeless motif that allowed for endless abstract-expressionist improvisation, channeling his grief into joy through the pure pleasure of painting.

Littlebird has included a number of nonfire paintings in the show, too. These are mostly animal motifs — deer, bulls, a hawk and a crow — inspired by paintings his father did decades ago. Littlebird’s animal paintings may seem more accomplished than the fire ones. The colors are more precise and intentional, and the compositions are more resolved. But because of that, they’re less interesting. With “Meditations on Fire,” Littlebird lets himself fail — and, honestly, some are better than others — but that’s what an artist needs to do if they’re hoping to achieve greatness. No risk, no reward.

There are not many great fire paintings in the world, as I was saying earlier. Fire is almost never seen in Paleolithic cave art, despite the supreme importance of fire-making to our Paleolithic ancestors. There’s fire in Hindu art — from Chola Dynasty bronzes of Shiva dancing in a ring of fire to Balinese paintings of Sita from “The Ramayana” undergoing her fire ordeal — but the real subjects of those artworks are the figures, not the flames. Ditto Catholic paintings of Moses and the burning bush or saints burned at the stake.

In the Netherlands in the 17th century, it became popular to paint scenes of cities consumed in flames — the “brandjes” (“little fires”) genre, they called it — and the 19th century English painter J.M.W. Turner’s two celebrated paintings of the British Houses of Parliament in flames descend from that tradition, as does Ed Ruscha’s 1968 painting, “Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire.” But those paintings are more about the destruction of the human-built environment than flames as such. To call them meditations on fire would be like putting the B-movie spoofs “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” into the “still-life” category just because they have plants in them.

Some of Littlebird’s paintings have Turner-like effects. “Meditations on Fire No. 41,” for instance, is one of his most densely layered compositions, and in the coronal aura between foreground and background, the underpainting shines through and things glow. In the catalog, Littlebird writes about how his dad, even when he had Alzheimer’s and could no longer remember many names and dates, still got excited about such painterly effects. “When viewing my paintings, he would lean forward, eyes suddenly bright, and talk about an underpainting peeking through the surface,” Littlebird writes, “and how it was never a mistake but a whisper from an earlier decision.”

One of the few art historical masterpieces I can think of that treats fire as a standalone subject — art historians, feel free to correct me — is “The Flame” by Jackson Pollock, which the artist painted in the 1930s, about a decade before he started doing his drips. The dominant colors in that composition are white, black and red, and their high-contrast jagged patterning fuses cubist fragmentation with German expressionist messiness to create an image that’s not at all naturalistic but that captures the intense energy and dynamism of fire in a highly original way — much as Littlebird does. But even here, most viewers see an abstracted skeleton at the bottom of Pollock’s composition, making “The Flame” more properly a cremation or immolation painting than a painting of flames as such.

In the exhibition catalog, Littlebird writes about the meaning of firekeeping in Pueblo culture. Beyond the literal sense of keeping a fire burning for the length of a ceremony, firekeeping also serves as a metaphor for keeping the spirit of one’s ancestors alive. Littlebird is keeping the spirit of his father’s art alive through his own work. With the animal paintings, that influence is direct and rather dutiful. But with “Meditations on Fire,” I feel he has taken what he’s learned from his father and found his own voice, which is wholly original. A psychological, spiritual and artistic rebirth.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.