Fire Next Time

Jane Panetta: This painting, called Fire Next Time, which Packer made in 2012, is an early work of hers in the show.

Narrator: Curator Jane Panetta.

Jane Panetta: It feels very deliberately cinematic to me. It’s like she wants you to feel immersed in the space. And I think as much as it’s a portrait painting, in some ways, it’s also a painting that really privileges the depiction of the environment that the sitter is in. It’s really about the environment, I would say. And she’s really pulled out certain details within the painting. You see the fan on the wall, the fan on the table, the ladder, the stairs, you see those things very specifically.

And I’m also struck by her use of this orange palette in the painting. It gives the work a kind of high intensity. It’s a color that I would associate with fire. And the fans being in the painting as well, it feels like in part it’s about heat. It’s about the heat of the space.

The title of this painting, Fire Next Time, relates to a book by James Baldwin, that contains two essays in it. And one of the essays is written as a letter to Baldwin’s fourteen-year-old nephew. I think the intimacy of the essay, this idea of him corresponding directly to his young nephew and kind of about his own experiences, that that sensibility, that intimate sharing, really is akin to what she’s getting at in this painting: that you’re in a kind of interior and intimate and private space.