Forest Fire

Doris Meyer Chatham

Doris Meyer Chatham's biography details a rather remarkable journey and gives a lot of insight into the artist's work. One turning point was her time spent with Atelier 17 in Paris in the late 1950s.

She learned lithography from Glen Alps in 1955 and her lithographs from this period have wide margins with slices and cutouts in these margins that were used to help register the color.

In this color lithograph, done in 1955, she captures the chaos and yet strange destructive beauty of a forest fire as it creates its own weather system.

Meyer uses the color sparsely, with areas of white showing through, like ashes and embers scattering. The composition has a kind of vortex that expands outward as an uncontrolled force.