Burnt Sienna

The ultimate showdown...Famous artist and ex-marine Chase Malone is asked by an emissary of mysterious businessman Derek Bellasar to paint a portrait of Bellasar's wife. He politely refuses, but when he finds his home bulldozed and his gallery sold, he has little choice but to take the job. Bellasar is one of the world's wealthiest and most dangerously twisted arms merchants. He has married a succession of beautiful women all of whom mysteriously died after having their portrait painted by a top artist. For Chase, rescuing the madman's current wife is only his first challenge. If he is ever to feel safe again, he must return to Bellasar's turf for a deadly confrontation -- that only one can survive.
"That was a long time ago. I don’t think about it,” Malone claims. But if, according to the critics, his paintings celebrate life more than any artist since the Impressionists, one can’t help suspecting that the sensuality in his work is a reaction to the nightmare he barely survived on the night of December 20, 1989, during the U.S. invasion of Panama. A painter who was once a military helicopter pilot — in the cutthroat competition of today’s art world, that dramatic juxtaposition between Malone’s violent past and artistic present accounts for part of his mystique. But while his Marine background is exotic to some patrons, it also initially made critics skeptical that his work had merit. As Douglas Fennerman, Malone’s art representative, points out, “Chase had to work twice as hard to earn his reputation. From that point of view, it doesn’t hurt to have a soldier’s background if you want to survive on the battlefield of the galleries in Manhattan.”