Visual Art

Incendiary Tactics

artist Eric Lee has a fiery visual technique

Theresa Schneider, photos by Andrea Paulseth |

It’s pretty rare that an artist gets very far by setting his or her work on fire. That is, unless, the artist is local painter Eric Lee.

Lee uses a technique called oil with mixed processes to create his work, but the process isn’t as easy as it sounds. “It’s definitely a multi-step process,” Lee said.

He tries to incorporate household products, such as furniture stain, fire ash, and toilet paper to texture and color his canvases. After that, he adds a little fire.

Sprinkling his work with gunpowder and different dried plants, Lee ignites the gunpowder to create the backdrop for his oil painting. But instead of actually allowing his work to catch fire, Lee uses pressure to smother any flame – a technique he calls “blasting.”

“It really is just a big plume of smoke,” he said. “It’s a harmless, but effective way to make marks on a canvas. … I’m using it as a device to see where I’m going to paint. Sort of as a stain on a wall.”

While blasting itself doesn’t take long, Lee said some of his large pieces can have as many as 40 different blasts, all of which are done before Lee even begins painting.

The Dead and Dying of the Analogue World, a collection of oil paintings by Lee, are now on display at Infinitea Teahouse, 112 E. Grand Ave. Drew Seveland, co-owner of Infinitea, said the thing that captivates him most about the new art exhibition is the crispness of the painted lines. And he isn’t the only one noticing. Regular patrons of the teahouse are already responding positively, he said.

“Everybody appreciates the art ... they appreciate the different textures and how painstaking something like this is to make,” Seveland said.


    And the pieces are just that, painstaking. Lee said he spent an average of four months, up to seven hours a day, on each piece on display at the teahouse, his first solo show. Working without under drawings, if something didn’t turn out just the way Lee wanted, he scratches off the oil paint and starts again, sometimes working for hours on one square inch.

But all the working and reworking only adds to the effect Lee is trying to achieve. “The more I mark it up, the happier I am with it … It’s almost as if you’re looking at the thing itself,” he said.

The large, dark pieces don’t come off as morbid, Seveland said, but rather capture the decaying of things that are just run down. “It really reminds me of Duluth and how it used to be a bustling place 100 years ago,” Seveland said.

Lee, who grew up in Eau Claire and moved away after high school, found his inspiration in the neighborhoods and docks in Superior. Even after moving back to Eau Claire, Lee still finds himself painting from what he saw in the industrial town situated in a post-industrial era, he said.

“It has a certain mood up there, and it’s not exactly cheerful.”

Lee said he is interested in not only painting, but also thinking about the United States as a post-industrial country, and he considers all the artifacts left over from the industrial era and the rust-belt to be the country’s cultural inheritance. But Lee doesn’t look at these artifacts through a romantic eye, but through that of an anthropologist’s.

“Those things that are left there are pretty strange to people my age or younger. … It was a tough, angry, hard way of living. … (The collection is) about those things that we’re building on.”

    The Death and Dying of the Analogue World will be on display at Infinitea Teahouse, 112 E. Grand Ave., Eau Claire, through Saturday, Feb. 7. A reception will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. on Jan. 29.