This body of work encompasses my studio practice in the 11 months since my last show and series Creatures of Duality. The quick turn-around between major shows was both daunting and galvanizing; a timeline that encouraged bold action. I began this series with a nagging desire to teach myself to paint fire. As Californians, our fear of fire is ever-present, and for many of us, a force that alters the course of our lives. The recent scope of destruction and loss that our friends and family in LA have experienced brings a rawness and tenderness to approaching this elemental force. Following years of paintings about the dusty drought-stricken forests, I painted flames as a form of deep visual research into how to represent something that is at once awesome, terrifying, transparent, and a source of light. Created from my own photographs using our backyard fire pit, the nearly abstract compositions present the mesmerizing practice of watching a fire slowly diminish into embers and ash—perhaps one of humanity’s oldest shared spaces for reflection.

Building on the idea of watching flames as research, the series grew to include compositions further removed from reality. I work from the premise that the most fascinating shapes already exist around me; in this case in the shapes of waning flames, and the collapse of charred forms into ash. As a practitioner of abstraction and author of visual language; my job is to take that realia and deconstruct, dissolve, isolate and rearrange. If boldness was my guide in this work, then it brought me beyond acrylic painting to experiment with the crude and opulent oil stick. As if drawing with a cylinder of butter, I combined its brashness with delicate colored pencil, graphite and sgraffito techniques. The square “slide-like” format of the oil stick pieces references my fascination with the microscopic and unseen world. I seek to iterate upon our hypnosis as we share a silence by the fire.

-Jamie Treacy, 2025