Light in the Darkness
by Titus Gee
Fire artist Michael Stewart understands that flames dance best when surrounded by vacant night. His paintings capture this truth, both literally and symbolically, as he digitally manipulates photographs of fire into surreal and sometimes gruesome images.
Stewart’s work began as a whim, but steadily grew into an obsession and eventually overtook his life altogether.
When he rolled into Los Angeles with nothing but the contents of his car, Stewart was an industrial-punk musician with a one man band called Control Freak. To pay the bills, he took a job in the press room of a small newspaper 80 miles north of the city, then started taking community college classes in graphic design.
One day he took a photo in his fireplace, and saw something more in the flames than the dance of light. Over the next few hours he invented a (top secret) method for creating fine art paintings with a palate of flame. Within months he had become Pyro Painter, a notable force in L.A.’s underground scene.
Later his palate expanded to include the neon lights of Las Vegas in a series titled “Neon Hell.”
At its best, his work is both intricately detailed and striking in its broader compositions. Stewart manages to capture spiders and sealife, both real and imaginary, with a luminous ferocity that is both unsettling and surpassingly beautiful.
Nearly all of his art addresses itself to the topic of evil. In some pieces, such as the sea creatures, he finds sublimity among the dangerous and terrible elements of nature (and imagination), showing them to be not so sinister as they might appear. Other paintings address the sickening horror of evil itself – the destruction of drug addiction or raw representations of wickedness sketched in lines of fire. Still others simply revel in the polished faux darkness of the modern goth scene, where Stewart finds his most avid audience.
Some of his pieces can be deeply unsettling – and his collection is certainly not suitable for all audiences – but behind it lies a deep, almost unacknowledged, moral clarity. Even when depicting, or even admiring, the power of evil, Stewart calls it by its right name. His flaming brush offers no path to righteousness, but recognizes the difference between darkness and light.
