BROWNSVILLE — Jim Slusser teaches his students to paint with fire.The tools are simple: Fine steel wool. A lighter. Hand-held egg whisks and a cord to swing them by.The Central Linn High School students paint their masterpieces against the canvas of the night sky, searing each image into the lens of a digital camera on a tripod.They set the shutter to close after 10 to 15 seconds, then hurry over to the camera to see the result: glowing coils of blazing orange sending circles of sparks into the darkness.The works are part of Slusser’s experimental photography class, which he’s taught for the past two years, despite having technically retired as an art teacher eight years ago.He came back to Central Linn part-time after students asked to continue the photography portion of the class. He now teaches two classes: basic and advanced photography, with the experimental photography making up most of the advanced class.Six students are working on experimental photography at present, and four have come to Pioneer Park on this Thursday to play with light.Slusser has no particular agenda for the evening, nor for the class itself, except to enjoy the process of creation. No agenda, that is, except the one that drives all art: the desire to capture and shape reality in ways that express humanity.“Have you seen, ‘The Monuments Men’?” he asked, referencing this year’s movie release depicting a platoon of World War II soldiers determined to rescue the world’s art treasures from the invading Nazis.The movie’s message is the same as Slusser’s: Art is the history of a culture and must be preserved for future generations to understand.“It’s important today to look back and see where we have come from, to know what we’re doing now and how much progress we’ve made,” he said. “Without that, we’d be back in the Dark Ages.”Slusser’s students use darkness as the contrasting element for their art.In addition to the fire photos, they swing “light boards” made with battery-powered LED lights wrapped around yardstick-size slats of wood. The result is similar to a child’s Spirograph picture: intersecting spiral patterns in neon-bright blues, yellows and reds, as if someone scribbled on the universe with a highlighter pen.Another favorite trick is wrapping lights around an object shaped like a steering wheel and sending it rolling around a board to create a glowing dome.Junior Cristal Munoz-Lopez, 17, loves people’s reactions when they see one of her photos.“It’s like, ‘Wow, how did you do that?’” she said, adding that she likes to joke: “It’s a secret. I can’t tell you.”Slusser had a similar reaction when he first came across the work of Evan Sharboneau. The Eugene photographer has a website, photoextremist.com, and is the author of the e-book “Trick Photography and Special Effects.”The book “just knocked my socks off completely, what he was able to do,” Slusser said.Best of all, it used simple props and techniques he could easily pass along. The experimental photography unit was born.Slusser’s students often take their work into their own hands, borrowing the tripods for an evening of experimenting outside of class.Junior Channy Bivens, 17, started with spinning the flaming steel wool in a simple arc above her head.“Then we started changing how we spun it, and it changed the picture,” she said.Students swung the wool atop playground structures, or in circles as they walked backward, or next to a pond to catch the reflection.“I’ve been amazed at what they’ve been able to accomplish at home,” Slusser said.Channy, Cristal and Cristal’s twin brother, Cristian, all say they’d like to minor in photography when they move on to college. At this point, they don’t have plans to use their new skills for anything but fun.That’s all right with Slusser, who pursued an art degree and continues to teach the subject even after retirement for exactly the same reason.“I just want this to be fun, and for the kids to be excited about this when they leave,” he said.