This photo is of me painting "Heart Birds" in early 2020. It is a painting about healing the heart and will be included in my show at The Gallery @ opening on January 22nd in Huntington, NY. The day of the opening marks one year and a day after my first stroke last year, so the reception will be a celebration of life. Hard to see all the colors and metallic gold of the background, but the photo shows its size.
I needed to paint this. With so much loss in my my life (and much more since), I had to paint a healing heart, one protected by the heart birds as I call them, a sign of something Divine, protecting my heart. The heart has been a subject in my art since the mid 1990’s when I was diagnosed with a rare heart issue. One in a thousand people in the world have it, I was told. Then in the last ten years I was diagnosed with another heart issue. Arrhythmias are just a part of my life but I never get quite used to them. Back in the 90’s, I painted so many…. “In My Heart”, “Broken Heart”, “Heart Mountain”, “Garden Heart” (which I gifted to my cardiologist at St. Francis Hospital), “Umbrella”, and I even created a large wooden sculpture that I painted in oils titled “Melting Heart”. One lady who saw it dubbed it “anatomy on a stick”, which was kind of funny and okay with me, since that’s what it looked like.
At least I’m painting a healing heart now, although I don’t think the heart is immune to pain, no matter how hard we try to protect it. Things will happen in the world that will hurt us that we can’t control. People will be cruel and unkind and we can’t control that, we can only control how we respond to it. The best we can do is go easy with ourselves, especially when we do the best we can with every day. We can do our best to stay away from situations and people who aren’t healthy for us, those who bully us, make us feel bad, hurt our hearts. The world may not be kind but we can choose to treat ourselves kindly, especially if we are conscious of how we are in the world. If we’re good people. If we treat others with kindness, compassion, and respect. If we are a presence of goodness in the world, even if it is the little bit of world around us. Go easy on ourselves and our hearts, especially if they’ve been through enough. I know mine has.