Phoenix: When Fire Becomes a Form of Thought
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 5ft x 4ft
Creation Date: April 2026
Collection: Abstract Inquiry
There is a moment in every painting when the surface stops being negotiable. With Phoenix, that moment came early — and never left.
The painting burns from the top down. Deep crimson and near-black ignite the upper field. The heat descends through amber, orange, and acid yellow until the lower half glows like embers that refuse to cool. The marks are thick, directional, urgent — vertical strokes cutting through horizontal ones, dark columns rising through the heat like structure that will not collapse. There is no resting place in this painting. No cool edge. No place of resolution.
I live and work in Phoenix, Arizona. The city is named for the mythological bird that rises from its own ashes — a creature that knows transformation not as loss but as the only way forward. I returned to full-time painting in 2020, after building four companies that each required the willingness to burn down what existed in order to make room for what hadn’t been imagined yet. Avasta. SideCar. Wag Hotels. Diamond Foundry. Each one a fire. Each one a rising.
This painting is that autobiography compressed into a single surface.
In Conversation With
Phoenix sits in a conversation with painters who understood fire, urgency, and the irreversible mark. Anselm Kiefer works with scorched surfaces and ash that carry the literal residue of burning — his fire is elegiac, a reckoning with what was lost. This painting shares that understanding that fire is evidence, not decoration, but where Kiefer looks back, Phoenix is pure present tense: the combustion is still occurring. Gerhard Richter’s squeegee abstractions — marks made at speed, layers compressed into a single surface — inform the way earlier passages push through here, the painting becoming a record of time compressed rather than time passing. And Pat Steir’s understanding that the most powerful surfaces are those where the artist’s will and the medium’s nature are in continuous negotiation runs through every thick impasto stroke and bleeding passage in this work. Three painters, three approaches to urgency. The same fire, differently held.
The Painting
Phoenix is not named after the city alone, though the city earned it. It is named for what the city understands that most places don’t: that the desert heat is not hostile but clarifying. That what survives the fire is what was essential. That transformation is not something that happens to you — it is something you become capable of.
Standing in front of this painting in the studio, I have watched collectors stop mid-sentence. Not because it is beautiful — though it is — but because it is immediate. It does not invite contemplation from a distance. It demands that you be present, in your body, in the heat.
