burning
2026
Colored pencil on wood panel
27 inches x 39 inches
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Conceptual Statement

Torched through the skin, down to the spirit. There's a burning with tenacity that lingers in my soul. Layers of intensity; tangled and constricted; ripping through the surface, to vie for an audience. A breaking emerges—then the burning. Discovered a limit, succumbing to the load, resigned to the imminent—his frame, now his pyre.    

All hail!—to the rage king! To the apoplectic monarch of the abyss! See how his royal vestiges pour over him. See how he is deposed from within. A toast, to his burning! No long slow sleep, no embalming. We'll burn, like the heathen kings. Like the brokenness was all to ever precede us. The fortress is breached, and the fey washes over him. This is the burning of a soul rent. To consume, yet never consuming. Instead a brutal intensity, lingering endlessly. When the pace starts splitting the neck, and the demands are raging. From within to without, a scorching meltdown unfurls. Debased, wounded. Severity and brutalism. A mockery—of the enslaved one. Herein lays destruction. Herein lays his fate. 

It is a touch of the madness, and a touch of the truth. Waylaid by circumstance, by necessity: his plight. There is resignation, not strict agency. It is a complex state of scorching, and it obfuscates the destiny. Reducing us to rubble—it closes in on all sides. Trapped below, it incites the burning. When the whispers are imbibed. When the rupture becomes dominant. Just the pyre remains. Only derangement for company. And the immolation, omnipotent.