“Fires are just emblematic of a larger crisis,” Jim Denney says. Fire appears in many of his oil paintings in “The Landscape Is a Conveyor,” a two-person show with Jennifer Wynne Reeves at Philip Douglas Fine Art in Hudson. The first painting in the exhibition, Burning Observation, is ironic: A fire tower, built to detect forest fires, is itself aflame. Denney’s work is a quiet protest against global warming, inspired by his reading: Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Richard Powers.
Denney worked more than 20 seasons as a wildland firefighter for the US Forest Service in the central Cascade Mountains of Oregon.
Perhaps Denney’s paintings exorcise his own fire trauma. I can’t think of another artist who was a former firefighter, but Denney points out that a number of writers have been fire watchers: Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Edward Abbey among them.
Some of the images include distant columns of smoke, such as Hives and Fire: a phalanx of beehives stands in a meadow as smoke billows in the distance (perhaps symbolizing the endangered lives of honeybees?).
Trojan depicts a cooling tower of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant near Rainier, Oregon, which was permanently closed in 1992. The smoke in this work isn’t from fire, but from the tower’s demolition in 2006. The structure itself is dying.
One canvas shows a wigwam burner, a steel cone atop a sawmill where waste products were burnt: bark, sawdust, the butt ends of wood. “Every town had a mill, and every mill had a wigwam burner,” Denney says. “When I grew up, they were really scary—big, huge towers that always had flames coming out of them.” Wigwam burners, once a fixture of the sawmill landscape, were phased out as air-quality regulation and environmental scrutiny increased.
Denney bought a house in Hudson in 2017. “When I started doing these paintings, one of my models was Frederic Church,” he says, “and here I am two miles from Olana [Church’s ornate mansion]!” Denney is inspired by the Hudson River School painters, but instead of the celestial light they invoked, his fire paintings emit an infernal glow.
Minidoka Guard Tower seems to be a fire lookout, but is actually a reconstructed observation tower from the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. Two of Denney’s most influential art teachers, Roger Shimomura and Frank Okada, were imprisoned at that camp during World War II. Minidoka is now a national interpretive center explicating the history of the racist mass imprisonment. Denney often stops there on his yearly trips back to Oregon.
“Is the guard tower on fire?” I ask.
“Well, I’ve still got a few days,” Denney replies, chuckling. “I’ve been thinking that this would have a little fire, erasing history”—a dig against Donald Trump’s penchant for revising the texts in historical museums.
Fire is a multiple metaphor. According to Symbolism: A Comprehensive Dictionary by Steven Olderr, it can stand for “spiritual energy; libido; fecundity; creation; destruction: purification of evil; the soul; the creator god; essence of life…” The list goes on. Of course, the first association with fire is Hell itself. A raging fire unifies a landscape, revealing that almost everything we know—even the human body—is flammable.
The African-American spiritual from which James Baldwin extracted a memorable title includes the lines: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign: / No more water; the fire next time.” In this case, fire is the ultimate apocalypse.
Denney’s paintings are paired with are five works by Jennifer Wynne Reeves (1963-2014): near-abstract, dancerly acrylic paintings influenced by Krazy Kat cartoons. Reeves made paintings that feel less constructed than excavated—raw, tender, and insistently alive. She built her surfaces from thick skeins of paint, scraps of material, and abrupt gestures that hover between abstraction and the faintest traces of figuration. A button might become an eye, a loop of wire a limb, but nothing resolves into narrative; the work instead operates in an emotional register, asking the viewer to intuit rather than decode. Reeves had a gift for making the provisional look necessary, as though each mark were a survival tactic rather than a compositional choice.
Her paintings also carry the unmistakable charge of someone insisting on presence. Even at their most playful, they vibrate with vulnerability and candor, registering desire, exhaustion, and a kind of defiant hope. Reeves used texture like a verb—pushing, dragging, scarifying—so that the surfaces read as both wound and healing. The result is work that feels intimate without being confessional, symbolic without being didactic. To stand before a Reeves painting is to encounter a mind thinking through matter, wrestling with the limits of form and feeling, and finding, against the odds, a way to make the reckoning beautiful.
Related location
Philip Douglas Fine Art
This article appears in December 2025.
