The State of the Heart

I made all of these with prisma-color pencils. Yes, the hearts are all done free-hand.

These are in ascending order, so the first one is the most recent piece I have finished, followed by the one before and the one before that, in the Heart Series

Healed Heart - True

I was at The Younique Foundation retreat last week. During the retreat was art journaling, and I saw a stencil of a huge heart with all these little bits in it. Robert was on my mind a LOT during those first two days. I was seriously homesick. We are in such a good place, better than ever, and it was really hard to be away from him, but I knew I needed to be there. So I saw that heart stencil and I thought of me and Robert! So I created an integrated heart, like two hearts into one.

I'm the nature-lovin' tree-huggin' girl. He's the city sysadmin high-tech boy. His favorite color is red, mine is green. We both love purple and colors, and, we both love and appreciate each other. I was quite happy I was able to finish it on Wednesday the 28th of 2019! The last night of the retreat. I was so happy to present this to Robert. He hung it up above his desk. <3

"Healed" Heart

I started this in 2003 and completed it in 2005. I was a mom of a two year old. I started it while pregnant after my therapist told me I was "fine" totally mentally healthy. She had somehow totally missed that I was complaining of PTSD symptoms that were still present in my life. I can talk theory really well, but in practice life is very different. Perhaps that's why. I finished it to show Robert how much he had helped my heart heal, and here is my nicely healed heart just for him. Except that's also when he said he wanted a divorce (oh, irony), but that turned into a separation for two years. We worked it out, praise be, but the timing was interesting to say the least. Also, I wanted to kick myself for making blue flowers instead of purple flowers in the first one. Oh well.

Harmed Heart

I was severally depressed with suicidal ideation when I did this back when I was 20 years old in 1999. When I showed Robert  I asked him if he knew whose hand it was. He said, "Mine?" I said, "Sometimes." But that's not who it really was. For whatever reason I couldn't say who it was at that time, I think I was too surprised thinking it could be him. But really it was Ojiji, my paternal parent whose actions against me growing up caused PTSD. After I completed it, I instantly wished I could redo the flames in a more realistic way, but oh well.