Playing with Fire.
I like art and fire. A lot.
It is a running joke at our house now, me and my fire and my art. I grew up camping, staring into flames for long hours as the night stretched on. The fire was an anchor, something alive that held the dark back and gave you space to think. Maybe that is wired into all of us, the way we fall into the rhythm of the flames without anyone needing to explain it.
Where I am from, the Texas Panhandle, fire is not just comfort. It is chaos too. Grass fires do not creep politely across the land. They explode. Whole counties can disappear under smoke and flame before the morning is halfway over. You respect something like that. You learn early that fire can feed you or erase you. You do not muscle it into place. You work with it or you get out of the way.
Maybe that is why I am drawn to it the way I am. Not to fight it. Not to tame it. To work alongside it. Being an artist means making some kind of peace with your ego. You have to believe you have something worth showing, and you have to need people to pay attention, not for the spotlight or the applause, but because making something with no connection feels a little like shouting into the wind. You want the work to land somewhere. You want to know it mattered to somebody besides you.
With fire, I am cautious. I respect the danger. I take every safety measure I can. With art, I chase what is dangerous. I want to stand as close to it as I can without pulling back. I do not want polite work. I want the kind that shakes you up, that rattles your frame and leaves a mark you still feel days later, the kind you are not sure whether to thank or curse.
I have chased that kind of art across the map. New York. Los Angeles. London. Dallas. And beyond the velvet ropes and sidewalks, out into the desert that knows me too well. I have stood beyond the stanchions, touched the things they told me not to touch, because sometimes you have to get close enough to feel the heat or you never really understand what you are looking at. I have watched pyramids burn so massive they pulled the flames into a vortex and threw fire into the sky like something alive. Something old enough to remember when we all lived by firelight alone.
Somewhere along the way, I learned to trust that pull, even when it drags me into uncomfortable places, especially then. It is not just my pull. It is something we all feel if we let ourselves. The instinct to lean closer to what is real, even when it is wild, even when it might leave a scar.
When fire and art meet, that is where I disappear. If you have ever shared a fire with me, you have seen it. One minute I am there, laughing and talking. The next, I am gone, pulled into something much older than me. We have spent more of our history gathered around fire than apart from it. That memory is still there. Still part of us. Still waiting.
I feel it every time the flames brush my face and the night folds in. That moment, standing together, surrounded by friends and strangers, feeling the heat alive between us, that is what I chase. Not just the fire. Not just the art. The gathering. The chance to stand close to something wild and real, something that does not ask you to perform, something that lets you be who you are without needing anything more, something alive enough to burn you a little and real enough to leave a mark you actually want to carry.