(oil on canvas)
“It does not matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you do not do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
Mrs. Patrick Campbell
“The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.”
Gloria Leonard
“Prelude” is a celebration of romantic love. It was inspired by one of my own love stories. I created it as a way to permanently preserve what I was feeling at the moment. Being in love is my favorite state of being. It doesn’t even matter if it’s tragic, unrequited or borders on insanity. I enjoy the ride regardless, and I always end up learning something new in the process. If it weren’t for my romantic life I probably would’ve never had any interest in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy or Tarot cards. Not to mention snowboarding and belly dancing. Full disclosure: I suck at both.
My love stories are always epic. I don’t half-a-s anything. Especially romance. I could easily write “War and Peace” sized tomes about some of my romantic endeavors, but it’s less time consuming for me to paint them. “Prelude” is my romantic novel on canvas. With this painting I tried to portray the tenderness one feels when two people get completely dissolved in each other.*
When I was working on “Prelude” I drew my inspiration from El Greco. Way ahead of his time El Greco believed in supremacy of color over form, which is something that resonates with me. Of course, it also resonates with a lot of modern artists, although I suspect it’s because quite a few of them couldn’t paint a form as is even if their life depended on it… But I digress.
I feel it’s absolutely wonderful that an artist has an ability to reshape reality with unrealistic shapes or colors to emphasize even farther the subject matter’s substance. Did I lose you? I think I just lost myself on that one…. What I’m trying to say is that an artist can use colors to enhance the meaning of the painting. An author can’t get away (unless they are writing science fiction) with calling the sky green, because it would not sit right with the reader’s knowledge of what colors the sky could possibly be. The sky could be cloudy, blue, ominous… But not green! Meanwhile an artist can paint the sky green and it wouldn’t take anything away from the viewers perception of it. Is not that wonderful?
*Nowadays, we are warned to stay away from such closeness. It gets the label of codependency and is frowned upon by the experts who know what’s healthy and what’s not. I, personally, frown upon the experts. I’m not afraid of life and I’m certainly not afraid of love. I want to experience everything humans have experienced before they had experts to tell them what a healthy relationship has to look like.