Art: Burning Questions: Genesis Chapman’s Fire on the Mountain (Installment III)

You smell that? It’s not your neighbor overcooking burgers again. That’s the scent of trees, homes, and entire ecosystems going up in flames. Not metaphorical flames—real, honest-to-god, bright orange infernos licking their way through everything in sight. And if you look at Genesis Chapman’s latest piece in his Fire on the Mountain series, you might just feel the heat singeing your eyebrows.

Chapman doesn’t paint pretty pictures of nature. No sweeping Hudson River vistas, no sun-dappled hills. His art doesn’t ask you to admire nature—it asks you to pay attention to its destruction. And this third installment of Fire on the Mountain is the visual equivalent of someone grabbing you by the collar, shaking you, and yelling, “ARE YOU SEEING THIS?!”

Let’s talk about what’s happening here. The image is a masterclass in fire, raw and merciless. The trees in the foreground? Blackened skeletons, barely holding on. The ground? A churning river of flames. The sky? Forget it. It’s been swallowed whole by a fiery apocalypse. The whole scene looks like something out of a Michael Bay movie—except there’s no heroic last-minute save. Just destruction.

The Artist & His Fight

Genesis Chapman isn’t just painting from imagination. He grew up on Bent Mountain, Virginia—a place now permanently scarred by pipeline expansion. He watched corporations chew through the land he called home, and instead of throwing a Molotov cocktail (tempting, I’m sure), he picked up a bottle of ink. His work is as much protest as it is art, blending intricate detail with explosive energy. Every stroke seems to say, this didn’t have to happen.

And that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Fires don’t just start themselves. Sure, lightning strikes exist. But more often than not, it’s corporate greed holding the match. Pipelines, deforestation, climate change—pick your poison, they all lead to the same endgame: the land gets torched, the companies get richer, and the people left behind get, well, left behind.

We’ve Been Here Before

This isn’t the first time artists have tackled environmental destruction. The Hudson River School painters gave us majestic landscapes, urging people to respect nature. The Romantics wrote about the sublime—a fancy word for “nature is beautiful but could also kill you.” But Chapman isn’t interested in reverence or poetry. His work is pure, undiluted rage—the kind of visual indictment that doesn’t whisper but screams. If those old-school landscape painters saw this piece, they’d probably weep into their oil paints.

The Big Question

So here we are, staring at Chapman’s third piece from his Fire on the Mountain series. The fire roars, the land crumbles, and the question lingers:

If we saw the world burning, would we grab a bucket of water or just take a selfie for Instagram?

#FiredUp #GenesisChapman #ClimateCrisisArt #ArtAsActivism #PipelineDisaster #WatchItBurn #MaybeStopSettingThePlanetOnFire