DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

I’ve just returned from a week of teaching and body painting at SummerFest, the new festival of the creative spirit at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Sherman, New York.  For many years, Brushwood has hosted Sirius Rising, Starwood (now moved to Wisteria in Ohio), and other festivals, and it’s become fertile ground for a community of artists and musicians, pagans and faeries, free spirits and freedom seekers.  I’ve been going out there since 1999, and it is one of my essential places.  I’ve previously posted some of my body art from Brushwood here, here, here and here.

The night life at Brushwood revolves around fires.  Every night there are several small fires with drum circles, didgeridoos, trance music, rituals or dancing.  The final night of every festival features a huge bonfire like the one pictured at the top of this post.  The fire shown below was the scene of quiet drumming with complex middle eastern rhythms.

I can go into a quiet reverie watching the slinky, dashing movement of flames.  Fire is a difficult subject for photography, as its essence is in its movement.  A long exposure blurs the flame into smooth streaks of light.  A short exposure captures some of the remarkable fleeting shapes that appear in the flames, but often makes the fire seem smaller than it appears to the eye.

Even the small campfires at Brushwood are meticulously constructed and tended with quiet vigilance by Brushwood’s legendary guild of fire tenders.  Young men and women learn the craft and safety techniques from elders with years of experience, and graduated apprentices proudly sport the emblem of their status, red suspenders worn hanging down.

The way the wood is stacked and structured channels and focuses the energy being released from the wood.  The fluid forms of flame cling to, lick over, and leap from the wood that feeds them.

Sometimes the shapes of the flames spark my imagination with pictures of dancing figures, faces, leaping horses, diving raptors and crashing waves.

Here a man decorated in a leopard pattern by body painter Vann Godfrey draws dancing energy from the flames in the drum circle enclosure called the Roundhouse.

During a festival week, while nightly fires burn in the roundhouse for all-night drumming and dancing, a large bonfire stack is constructed in an open field.  Here you can see the roundhouse in the background, and the bonfire stack in the foreground.

This is the bonfire from the Starwood Festival of 2004, one of the biggest fires I ever saw at Brushwood, as it is first ignited.

Sometimes the bonfires also contain fireworks.

The final night bonfires bring together the whole Brushwood community in a mass celebration.

Below, a friend’s fiery red hair is illuminated by the flames as she watches the bonfire.

People dance or run in a circle around the towering conflagration.

The really big fires show different patterns compared to the small fires.  The densely packed red-hot embers have blue flames dancing over their surface.

The sheer concentration of uprushing energy produces a whirlwind of flame.  If it’s raining, you won’t get rained on if you stay near the fire, as it blows the raindrops back up into the sky.

Above the fire, glowing particles swirl and sometimes surge upward in fountains of light.

The final set of pictures in this post were taken at this year’s SummerFest bonfire.  All are fast camera exposures to capture the momentary shapes seen in the inferno, and exposed darkly enough to show the variations of brightness in the fire.

This incredible uprushing of fiery energy on Saturday evening was followed, on Sunday morning, by an incredible downrushing of lake-effect rain that caused flash flooding in all the low-lying areas of the camp – a perfect elemental balancing act!