Art Museum catches 'Fire'

For artist Su san Crile, everyday life is not always a source of inspiration for her work. In a departure from the abstract art she has focused on for the last 15 years, Crile's latest body of work, "The Fires of War," deals with environmental destruction caused by man.

Now showing at the University Art Museum in its only West Coast exhibition, "The Fires of War" consists of 14 powerful representations of the Kuwait oil field fires started by the retreating Iraqi army during the Persian Gulf War.

Crile we nt to Kuwait to record the images of disaster for a number of reasons. "One was certainly the sense of powerlessness," she said. "It made me feel that I really wanted to try to do something myself."

Susan Crile was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1942. S he received her bachelor's degree in art from Bennington College in Vermont. After receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, she was a resident in painting at the American Academy in Rome. She now lives in New York City, where sh e's been a professor at Hunter College for 11 years.

Crile left the comfort of New York behind to photograph and sketch the Burgan Fields, where some of the most intense well fires raged. Seeing the midday sky turn pitch black "was like going into t he center of hell," Crile said.

"I felt as if I were witnessing the end of the earth. I couldn't even understand what I was looking at," she said. "It had the feeling of being dumped on some foreign planet. It was certainly one of the most powerfu l experiences of my life. It made me realize that this is truly what the end of the earth could look like."

Crile's journey was not without danger. Fires raged at temperatures of 2,000 to 3,000 degrees, while temperatures in the desert were between 115 to 125 degrees. Crile had to breathe through a respirator most of the time.

To ensure her safety, Crile was accompanied by a safety director from Bechtel International.

"There were moments when I was truly frightened. I was very glad I w as with real pros, because those who had gone out without them ended up dead," Crile said.

Most of the images included in this exhibition are very large and striking, with contrasts of yellow and orange against the black of the oil and the sky.

Crile did not include any references to human life in these images; she felt including people would have made the images more like a traditional narrative.

"I was interested in a more destructive and powerful sense of what was happening with n ature, with the sort of man-made disaster which became a natural disaster," Crile said. "Like both the death and the birth of the world simultaneously."

Although it's been several years since she started this series, Crile continues to work with fi re images.

"This was something that hit me with a very strong sense of necessity," she said. "What's come of it is that I realized I would very much like to incorporate into my work some sense of both the internal and external world. I think in a way the fires of Kuwait are also fires of the late 20th Century. I think it's sort of the disruption of the post-modern world."

Much of Crile's earlier work can be characterized as abstract pastoral, a style that includes sensual forms of glowing co lor much like the lyrical strokes of Matisse.

Her work can be seen in many museums across the country, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Susan Crile will appear at the University Art Museum on Oct. 20 to discuss "The Fires of War." The public is invited to attend the free lecture, which will be f ollowed by a reception.