Veins of Porcelain: The Covenant of Dust and Flame

Veins of Porcelain: The Covenant of Dust and Flame breathes new life into Jackson Pollock’s  Landscape with Steer , transforming it into a searing odyssey of survival, conquest, and the mythic struggle etched across the wild horizons of the American frontier. This is not merely a depiction of a landscape—it is a reckoning with the raw forces that shaped it, a visual epic where man, beast, and earth collide under the relentless weight of ambition and the burning breath of chaos. 

The canvas is a battlefield of elemental contrasts. On the left, darkness reigns—a tempest of smoldering shadows and spectral fire. Here, Pollock’s chaotic lines surge like wild stallions through a storm, their blackened forms consumed by bursts of molten crimson and sulfurous gold. At the heart of this tumult, the figure of a lone gunslinger emerges from the void, his silhouette torn against the backdrop of a raging inferno. His hat pulled low, his weapon at the ready, he stands not as a hero, but as a haunted relic of a time when survival was bought with blood and fire. 

From the flames rises the spectral form of a great steer—its eyes glowing with the last embers of a dying world. This is no ordinary beast but a living symbol of the untamed land itself—majestic, violent, and forever hunted. Its massive horns curve through the chaos like the archways of a forgotten cathedral, and its breath swirls into the thick black smoke as if exhaling the sorrows of every broken promise made beneath this scorched sky. 

Transitioning to the right, the composition bursts into a blazing expanse of arid brilliance. The oppressive darkness yields to the golden ferocity of a sun-bleached desert, where dust and light blur into an endless horizon. Cowboys stride through this unforgiving landscape—modern gladiators wrapped in tattered coats and bold red scarves that whip against the wind like forgotten battle standards. Their faces are obscured by the harsh glare, their movements purposeful and resilient as they stand defiant before the coiling form of a monstrous serpent that arcs high above the dunes. 

This serpent, carved from the very bones of the earth, twists through the air like a living sandstorm. Its scales shimmer with the ghostly hues of burnt umber and sun-scorched ivory, each glint a reminder of the battles fought for dominion over a land that refuses to be conquered. The serpent is both adversary and guardian, the final barrier between man and the untamed freedom he desires but cannot possess without consequence. 

The color palette splits the narrative between ruin and resilience. On the left, Pollock’s chaotic inferno burns in tones of volcanic black, fiery crimson, and toxic yellows, a landscape of devastation and unrelenting violence. On the right, the world opens into the harsh serenity of desert golds, windswept beiges, and blinding whites, pierced only by the vivid flash of crimson from the cowboys’ tattered scarves and the polished glare of steel revolvers. 

As an artist, my thoughts while shaping this vision swirled around the mythology of the frontier—the eternal tug-of-war between civilization and wilderness, between control and surrender. Pollock’s original chaos becomes the heartbeat beneath this world, the pulse of the land itself rising in defiant resistance against every attempt to tame it. 

The steer stands as the spirit of this land—powerful, untouchable, and ancient beyond comprehension. The serpent becomes the embodiment of the land’s fury, coiled and ready to strike down those who forget that survival here is not granted through conquest, but earned through humility. And the lone figures of man—both hunter and wanderer—become echoes of a greater truth: that no matter how far we travel or how much we claim, the wilderness within us remains, untamed and waiting to rise. 

In  Veins of Porcelain: The Covenant of Dust and Flame , I sought to capture the thunderous silence that hangs over every forgotten trail and every scarred canyon—a reminder that in the grand theater of existence, we are but momentary shadows against a landscape that endures beyond all memory.