Lovely Truths

2024

Attempting to emulate generalized models of love that are commonly defined by social anecdotes. The alternate title for this ongoing work is "Love Wanted, Taught, Given Away, and Misunderstood by its Maker."

I encountered a carved wooden panel by Paul Gauguin in which he juxtaposed a series of figures in states of distress with a sentence of positive affirmation, "Be in love, and you will be happy." The conflict between the two aspects of the relief, both, supported my understanding of Gauguin's villainous nature and the conflict I see between love and how it is often depicted. Sayings like "love is all we need," "love will find a way," or "the greatest pleasure in life is love" feel hollow and, in practice, likely stunt the manifestation of love amongst acquaintances, new and old. I decided to design and carve panels that carried forward Gauguin's pairing of opposites. I identified seven components to carry forward into the new panels.

1. positive affirmation about love
2. object of desire
3. object of lust
4. acts of violence
5. reactionary objects
6. dangerous objects
7. implied setting

The nine affirmations I wrote and translated into French, "the language of love," were as follows

1. Investissez dans l'amour et rien d'autre "Invest in love and nothing else"
2. Pour tout avoir, possédez l'amour "To have it all, have love"
3. Être amoureux, être emerveille "To be in love, to be in awe"
4. L'amour est une religion, laisse-le te posséder "Love is a religion, let it possess you"
5. L'amour existe au delà de l'espace et du temps "Love exists beyond space and time"
6. Tout ce qui est, mais n'est pas c'est l'amour "All that is but isn't is love"
7. Si l'amour te saisit, retiens le de toute ta force "If love takes hold of you, hold it back with all your might"
8. Aimer est survivre "To love is to survive"
9. Laisse l'amour t'embraser. "Let love set you on fire."

Diotima said to Socrates about the God of Love- "He always lives in a state of need!"

Freud- "At its height, the state of being in love threatens to obliterate the boundaries between ego and object"

Joyce Carol Oates- "If they turn suddenly toward us we draw back- the skin shudders wetly, finely— will we be torn into two people?

Albert Einstein, in a letter to his son Eduard- "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."

Kents- "Still, still to hear her tender -taken breath! And so live ever- or else swoon to death!"