Fire Within Tablas de Daimiel

Before I traveled to Spain at the end of May, Ismael Terriza Reguillos, residency coordinator and communications director, wrote to tell me I had been selected to participate in the Tablas de Daimiel Artistic Residency, a fully funded program backed by the government of Castilla-La Mancha and Spain’s national parks administration, organized through the international tARTget Painting Prize in Madrid. This came as a complete surprise because I had not knowingly applied. My selection had been made from the pool of artists worldwide who had entered the tARTget Painting Prize.

He named Structural Omission. He wrote about rendering the tension between the known and the unknowable, and about representation that exposes its own limits. He said my perspective would offer a profound dialogue with the shifting, ephemeral landscape of the wetlands. I read that and understood what I had to do. I felt understood. I belonged there. My mission was not to paint a beautiful scene of a lush wetland, not to represent beauty. My work, as always, was to portray what my eyes would see and also what they would not see: what can and cannot be known. I needed to be firm with myself before I touched a canvas, because I knew there was a real risk of being seduced by the beauty of the wetlands and a deep internal pull toward representing that beauty in paint. I had to hold the line against making a beautiful wetland scene. That was not why I was there.

Four painters, one schedule

I arrived at Tablas de Daimiel with Phil Irish, Sergey Gusev, and Elsa González Zorn (Russia, Spain, Canada, US), four highly accomplished painters from four countries, sharing one schedule, one packed car, and more meals together than I can count.

Blue and green on the surface, fire underneath

The park had been a dry, smoldering fire not too many years before. Peat burns slow and underground, and these uncontrollable fires had been broadcast around the world. When I arrived in June, the wetlands had received heavy rain and held more water than they had in over a decade. I watched blue water, green reeds, and birds that depend on these wetlands on their migration from Africa to northern Europe and back. Lush on the surface. The tone of my ground would echo those fires across the same land.

A fever in the shared studio

The first week brought a steady stream of cameras: documentary cameras, a press event, visitors. I do not mind painting while other people are in the room; in fact I love the camaraderie of a shared studio. A camera pointed at me is another matter. I did my best to ignore it, and they seemed to feel my vibe and mostly focused elsewhere, which left me with the work.

The peat had smoldered for years. My version lasted three days.

I got sick. A light fever I could not shake for three days. I slept on the couch in the corner of the shared studio for an hour or two each morning and each afternoon while the others kept working around me and visitors sometimes spoke in whispers. I recalled a past life where the idea of sleeping at work, in front of others, was beyond my imagination. So unprofessional, so vulnerable, so wrong. Perhaps it was the fever, but I did not care. I was tired. I would work intensely and then fall asleep.

Iron oxide, and one afternoon on the large canvas

The few days before the residency began, I had gone to the Prado Museum in Madrid. I already knew what I would find, but I wanted to see it for myself: the iron oxide ground, the red, running under Velázquez and Goya’s masterpiece paintings. I was proud to bring the same underpainting to Spain, material that belongs to this country’s painting history, even though I use that ground assertively to investigate the unknown.

Tired and feverish, I went at my largest canvas and painted it in one afternoon, pretty much in one go: marsh water, low islands of grass, a dark line of trees, a sky with shifting light. The red still glows through the thinner passages, and in the thicker ones the contrast between painted and exposed ground is sharper. The next day I stayed in my hotel to recover. When I came back I touched the painting up a little, then decided this was what I had lived and moved on.

I wanted one painting to anchor the severity of what cannot be known. Perhaps even the dread that accompanies it. I painted a small oasis of the wetlands, perhaps ten percent of the canvas, and left the entire remaining surface as raw underpainting. My organizers looked at me with questioning eyes as they made their daily rounds through the studio. Finito, I said. (I think that might be Italian. They understood.)

The jury was still talking in Spanish

When the jury assembled on the last day, everything in front of the media and cameras was in Spanish, one hundred percent. I do not speak Spanish. They talked, then looked at me, then talked some more. Elsa, who was sitting next to me, said: “You won.” They were still talking. I had only her word for it. She said, go up there. I went up and shook some hands. Cameras again. The body of work I created during the residency was named Grand Prize, Art and Nature Award. My work will go on to be exhibited at the Ateneo de Madrid in September 2026. 

If you have ever won something in a language you do not speak, you know the feeling: applause, cameras, hands to shake, and no certainty about what was just said about your work.

I had prepared remarks on behalf of myself and the three other residents, thanking the organizers and hosts for the residency itself. The remarks were written before the awards event and shared with my cohort for their input. I spoke those remarks in front of the cameras and into the microphone; they were translated to Spanish by Elsa. The press reported it as an acceptance speech. It was both, I suppose, and neither.

Later I watched the video with captions. Clementina Díez de Baldeón, from the Ateneo de Madrid, said the work connected conceptually with the underground fire of the peats and the environmental fragility of the La Mancha wetlands. Above the water and vegetation, she said, a fire also appears that threatens and emerges through the painting itself. She praised the iron oxide grounds and said I had captured the essence of Tablas de Daimiel. She called the work conceptually magnificent and technically outstanding.

Following the final awards ceremony, at a meal with the organizers, Ismael said something to me I wont forget:

“Here in Daimiel we lived the fires. They are in us. Inside each of us. You captured that in your work. We feel it.”

That was the win.

He had written to me about Structural Omission before I arrived. On site, he saw something in the work that met the place. The ground I rolled in Seattle belongs to a lineage I had just seen at the Prado. The fires were in the past, not present at the moment, but they all know there is always a risk they return. The combustion is not controllable, and without the flooded Tablas, the fires are inevitable. I had not set out to paint a fire story. They found it anyway.