"Inside Out — Ego Fuel" centers on a faithful red protein shaker bottle — carried to the weight room for the better part of a decade, retired from duty the moment this painting was finished. Its translucent red body catches bands of shadow and light, and a buoy flag runs down its side and onto the ground below, a distress signal marking the bottle itself as the thing in trouble.

The field around it stands in for water, the invisible contents of the bottle — protein, pre-workout, creatine, whatever fuel it once carried — given the scale and presence of an ocean. Shaker balls, cast loose from the container they belong inside, drift near a cluster of sea piles like wreckage, the mechanism meant to keep the contents mixed come unmoored from the vessel it was built to serve.

A scarlet macaw, native to Venezuela, sits at the same height as the bottle, calm and composed at a remove, untouched by what is happening below it. The sea piles stand plumb, but their shadows fall at an angle toward the macaw, cast by a low, raking light stretching everything it touches toward that corner of the canvas.

Ego Fuel was painted in the aftermath of a shoulder injury that took away the physical capacity the artist had built his identity around — a rupture that left him searching for who he was without it. The bottle becomes both witness and casualty: a container that held what once felt essential, cracked open at exactly the point it could no longer be held the same way.

Rev. 07/2026