Spirit of Fire (Pele)

Pencil and watercolor on paper, signed and dated in yellow-orange pigment along bottom edge, Bertha Lum 1921, mounted to wood stretcher with paper label on verso stretcher with typed titled, SPIRIT OF FIRE werehouse [sic] no: 156; 1921.

While Lum’s earliest self-carved and self-printed works tended to focus on gradations of color and tone with minimal emphasis on the black outline, her use of the keyblock evolved after she acquired training from professional carvers during her second trip to Japan in 1907. During the 1910s, Lum increasingly imbued her soft-hued atmospheric studies in light and shadow with highly stylized looping and swirling lines suggesting a strong influence from the international Art Nouveau style in an interesting feedback loop of Japonsime.

This painting, produced in the year before her consequential trip to Peking, China (an inflection point in the development of her printmaking process with an even greater emphasis on the outline), is a quintessential example of Lum’s fantastical work, in which she contrives mythical subject of her own imagination, a spirit of one of the essential elements, fire.