I first began to think deeply about the relationship between human beings and fire in October of 2013 while at the Playa Artist Residency Program in eastern Oregon. The residency lies at the foot of a steep escarpment called Winter Ridge on the shores of the shallow alkaline Summer Lake. It is a wide open high desert landscape, populated more by cattle than people and not many of either. All along the steep slopes of the ridge stood dead juniper and ponderosa pine, the blackened remnants of the Toolbox Complex Fire in 2002, one of the worst in the nation that year. Many nights at the residency I sat in the common room enjoying the warmth and light of a large stone fireplace while snow whirled and blew outside. The contrast between the wildfire that had swept this landscape (and which had come very close to destroying the property on which I stayed) and it’s comforting cousin in the hearth before me, became a focus of contemplation. The paintings in this exhibit are the beginning of an ongoing visual essay exploring our deep connection to fire and the impacts of fossil fuels. Without fire we would not even exist. Cooking food allowed our guts to shrink enabling us to walk upright, and our caloric hungry brains to grow ever larger. Using fire we became like it, sweeping across landscapes and transforming them utterly. In it’s varied forms we simultaneously love fire and fear it. But all too often, at our peril, we take it for granted. To make matters worse the fires that fuel modern life are largely hidden. For millenia the hearth fire was the center of social life, a source not only of nourishment but of light in the dark and warmth in the cold. But now most of our fire is locked away in engines and power plants, sealed up like a genie in a bottle and made to do our bidding. These paintings compare traditional fires and fireplaces to the hidden fires in engines and power plants. Comparisons are also drawn between coal and wood, a reminder that fossil fuels are essentially fossil landscapes from a time eons before human beings existed. One ironic result of their use may well be an increase in wildfires on today’ s landscapes, especially in the American West. The work as a whole is meant to remind us of the primacy of fire in our lives, and to make us consider both the necessity and the difficulty of weaning ourselves from this dependency. For as our hidden hearths blaze merrily away the climate of the planet is changing as a direct result. Just because we don’t see the flames doesn’t mean the world isn’t burning. ...This weekend I drove down to Redding California to pick up my painting "Burn" from the West Coast Biennial at the Turtle Bay Exploration Park Museum. When I got there I was told, "By the way, congratulations. You won the 'People's Choice' award". I was and am incredibly touched. There is often a huge chasm between the aesthetics of the fine art world and the general public. What curators, museum directors and art critics pick out as noteworthy is often completely alien and incomprehensible to the individual who is likely to say, "I don't much about art but I know what I like." Personally I never saw any reason why one couldn't or shouldn't try to engage both audiences. The fact that Bonnie Laing-Malcomson, the curator of northwest art at the Portland Art Museum selected my piece to be included in this show was enormously gratifying to me. Winning the "People's Choice" award is equally so, and gives me hope that my work can occasionally bridge that yawning chasm. (https://carmackart.blogspot.nl/search?updated-max=2015-12-09T08:37:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=7&by-date=false)