Fumage: Drawing with smoke

Because you have to smoke an etching plate so that the drawing shines through clearly as the copper is revealed when a line is scratched through the wax coating, you become very aware of the properties and shapes made by smoke as it drifts around the plate. The wax tapers had to be held close to the plate but not close enough to touch it and you had to keep moving the tapers to ensure an all over even coating. This demanded quite a lot of concentrated control if you were to do it well and it is easy to see how someone doing this could decide to take the technique on further and use it to draw with. Occasionally I used to try out some smoke drawing but I never concentrated enough on it to make anything of value, but some people did. 

A detail of an etching by William Unger of the artist smoking his etching plate. 

Diane Victor's smoke drawings of missing children are made by standing under paper sheets strung out horizontally above her. She then uses a candle flame to draw without scorching or burning the paper. The technique embodies the situation extremely well, missing children becoming ephemeral ghosts, flickering into life and fading back into the soot they are made from. 

Diane Victor: A missing child

Watch this YouTube video below to see how to do this.

The artist Stephen Spazuk demonstrates how to use fumage techniques 

The Surrealist artist Wolfgang Paalen is supposed to have been the first person to have used this technique, but from what I have seen he mainly used the technique to stimulate his imagination rather than as a way to make exhibitable images. I'm pretty sure however that the first people to have used this technique would have been cave dwellers over 40,000 years ago, and since then the technique would have been re-discovered time and time again. 

Wolfgang Paalen 1938 Smoke Painting

The important issue is however context and the 'closure' of the idea. In Diane Victor's case the choice of the fumage technique deepens the idea. The drawings are ephemeral, the images float into view on the edge of disappearance and this echoes the subject matter of lost children. If not chosen carefully a technique like this simply becomes a demonstration of skill, a 'look what I can do with smoke' idea, which might be entertaining for 5 minutes but which is not a deep reflection on an issue about loss and the fragility of life, which Diane Victor manages to communicate when she uses the technique. 

The artist Sheila Gallagher at work

The artist Sheila Gallagher uses fumage techniques coupled with sophisticated stencil cutting and you can get a very good idea of how to use fumage from this video of her working. The technique nearly always suggests fragility and ephemeral traces and used with stencils always reminds me of those ghost images of people and other forms of life left on the walls and other surfaces still standing after the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. These images were 'shadows' of people and plants vaporised when the the atomic bomb detonated.

The shadow of plants left after an atomic bomb blast

These smoke and 'nuclear flash' drawings, can be linked to a long sometimes painful history of the shadow, the negative and the silhouette, topics that this blog has already touched upon. However I find that the most poignant of all these types of images is the one below of a shadow of a human being from Hiroshima. When I first saw it I couldn't believe it was real and in many ways I still can't. 

Read this technical manual from page 301 to get an idea of what was unleashed. 

See also

The vignette

Shadows

Articulated collage and shadow play

Further uses of shadow 

Drawing with light