Lighting a Fuse to Forge a New Way Forward

"Acrylic and bomb fuse under synthetic resin" -- not your standard list of art supplies. But it's what you read beside "Blue Shift," an abstract painting from 1996 that's in a show called "Modern Love: Gifts to the Collection From Heather and Tony Podesta," at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Fuses have become the trademark of New York artist L.C. Armstrong, born 53 years ago in Humboldt, Tenn. Though she's now best known for pictures of roses with stems that have been "painted" by burning fuses, she first made her mark as an abstract artist.

I was making my own painting panels, and after two weeks I'd have a perfect surface, like a sheet of paper. And it's pretty daunting because it's so beautiful -- why do anything on it? I thought I needed to defile it in order to make it not so precious, so I started burning it with cigarettes. But I wasn't a smoker, and I started getting a taste for the cigarettes. So I was looking for a different way to burn, and I came upon the bomb fuse serendipitously, in a store on Canal Street [in New York]. It's called visco fuse -- it's what's used in "Mission: Impossible"!

When you burn a line with a bomb fuse, it has a completely different meaning than if you airbrushed it to look that way. Because it is a process that's both constructive and destructive at the same time. Burning can be cauterizing for a wound, or it can be burning a clean cut in the hills to stop a raging fire. Fire's a very interesting element in that way. So that is a way to put some meaning back into a very minimal look.

"Blue Shift" is titled that because I think I felt a sea change coming.

'95 -- this was a crucial year. The flower paintings started that year.

'94 had been a really bad year for me. I had several tragedies. First, my mother died in February, unexpectedly. My grandmother died in the middle of the summer. I got a divorce that came through in September, and my sister died in December of AIDS. She was 30 years old. So [the year] was bookended by death. And I quit painting for a little while. Then my life turned around completely, and everything got really good. I met my [new] husband. And, at 42, I had a child.

"Blue Shift" was at the sea change I was sensing. Before I went into the flowers totally, I still had one foot in abstraction. And I could just feel that something was shifting. I thought people would think I'd gone soft in the head with the flowers, because I was known as an abstract artist. But I just decided that I didn't care anymore. I didn't care what anyone thought about me. I'd just sort of given up -- my heart was broken.

-- Interview conducted and condensed by Blake Gopnik

Modern Love: Gifts to the Collection From Heather and Tony Podesta runs through Sept. 21 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW. Visit http://www.nmwa.org.