Four Elements, Fire Composed from the paintings : Fire, Flame, Passion, Echo, Glow, Happiness Every fire holds a whole life inside it, from the spark that destroys to the warmth that heals. It starts as raw force, older than us all: fire, the heat that builds a world and burns one down with the very same hand. Then it catches in a person, and becomes flame: passion the instant it leaps, the sudden yes said with everything at once. Let that flame learn patience and it turns to passion proper: the slow-burning kind, the love or the work you'd still give yourself to unpaid, unwatched, for years. Let it soften and it becomes a glow: warmth without danger, the quiet light a person gives off simply by being fully, gladly alive. Let that warmth spill over to everyone in the room, and it is happiness. And long after the fire that lit you has gone, its heat is still in you: that is the echo, the flame passed hand to hand down the years, never quite going out. No one feels them apart. It is a single fire, running from the heat that ruins to the heat that heals, and every face on this cube was painted from the same hot corner of my palette. Let it loose and the fire finds a heat it has never burned at: fierce here, tender there, the whole warmth of it swinging with the turn, then leaping somewhere it has never reached. This is the oldest truth fire knows: that it gives life and takes it with one gesture, and never once burns the same way again.