FROM AN OPEN FLAME: DENNIS LEE MITCHELL

Just twelve years ago, Dennis Lee Mitchell, a trained ceramicist, developed a unique studio process to capture the visible vestiges of undulating smoke on sheets of paper. Today, the artist is producing truly masterful works on paper with the incorporeal medium—smoke—in explosive new color and the deep sooty blacks he is best known for.

Armed with an acetylene torch, Mitchell follows a careful process of experimentation, mixing powders and combined pigments with time and heat, much like ceramics and glazing, that has led him to the unique colorways in the smoke captured on paper. The process involves intentional science enhanced by chance—sometimes, colors combine and when heated, smoke in an entirely new hue. 

Mitchell is no stranger to trial and error. Each final signed work involves between 30 and 40 experimental proofs before the artist is satisfied. To provide some history, as an undergraduate, Mitchell found himself frustrated with the properties of paint. “I would put the paint on and say, well, nothing’s happening; it’s just sitting there.” Time and materiality were not lending him the clarity of voice he sought. “I knew I wanted to use something in transition as I did my work.” First, he discovered ceramics. “I could just weld the clay together [with acetylene torches]. I loved it, because it was right there, real fast, and one day, there was cheap paper next to me and I put the torch to it […] and I was totally taken by that.”

Many of Mitchell’s compositions resemble rosettes, mandalas, or flowers. He comes to these forms with the aid of a spinning wheel that is eight feet in diameter and affixed to his studio wall. “I needed something to alleviate programming and to leave something to chance,” says Mitchell, which is what inspired his use of the wheel. Of the centrifugal pieces, or possibly he was speaking of life generally, Mitchell said, “I am constantly looking for the center point.”