Fire

Fire — Reclaimed Acrylic on Panel
48" × 48" | 2023 | Damon DeWitt

Made entirely from paint my students threw away — dried skins peeled off abandoned palettes, pounds of color hardened and discarded before it ever reached a canvas. Nothing new was bought for this work.

Here the waste is burned down to char. Black impasto crawls across the panel in blistered ridges and cratered pools, swallowing the surface from the right edge inward. Underneath, the original color survives in fragments — pinks, yellows, blues bleeding through the seams where the black has not yet closed over. What the fire has not reached is what remains of everything it consumed.

From the Consumed series. We take more than we need and call the remainder someone else's problem. Fire does not distinguish between the two.

• Medium: Reclaimed acrylic paint on panel
• Size: 48" × 48"
• Year: 2023
• Original, one-of-a-kind work
• Signed by the artist