Not My Love(r)

By: Bernadine Fox BFA

She knew she had fallen in love when the colours around her were bigger and brighter.  When she had to walk away from that same love, it shattered her heart and Bernadine Fox squirreled away into her studio immersing herself in paint. In two weeks, she had completed twenty-four paintings.  Without realizing the significance of what she was doing, she had compulsively produced painting after painting of "anything."  In fact, the more vacuous the image the better it was for Bernadine to stay away from the pain that consumed her whole if she dared to just breathe in.

While she couldn't eat, she created luscious fruit until she realized that it was a biological product that begins to die as soon as it is touched by human hands and kissed by human lips. While shedding bucketfuls of tears, she turned to scenic water scenes until she nearly drowned in agony. She painted buildings until she realized that they were people’s homes: places built out of a promise of love, partnerships, and futures. So, she sought out wild animals and found relationships with other beings where communication is fraught with difficulties leaving them unreachable except at a distance through a camera lens, bars of a cage, on a canvas, or across a room full of people you both know but who do not know what you have shared. In the end, nothing she painted allowed her to avoid the angst that inflamed her tumultuous heart.

Looking through the images she produced, she saw that there were few metaphors lost in this series of seemingly trite paintings of nice looking objects. As the viewer, don’t be fooled by their surfaces. Like love, none of the pieces were overly thought out. All were quickly executed some taking no more than an hour. Each piece began with a black ground: the colour of sadness. She found her titles amongst nostalgic love songs from the 70s that belted out of her stereo muffling the sounds of her sobs. She used leftover canvases from her studio: bad paintings with poor compositions, missteps that made them unworthy of continuing, or botched creative endeavours with fatal flaws in their execution that destroyed their potential and were only redeemable with the illusion of a "pretty picture." The former is descriptive of most failed relationships and the latter has been the very bane of Fox’s artistic experience and focus.

All of it proves that regardless of what we create, it all has meaning and is an extension of our very self. We cannot escape who we are. Those very things that make us the living, breathing human beings we are allow us to touch and rub up against the lives of others causing friction, pain, growth, messiness, and (hopefully) healing. As Einstein stated, ‘All is Relative." Every action we take in life has an impact on ourselves and others. Even with those things we define as having no meaning, that which we are not doing, or that which we deny – ultimately each step, each word, each breath, and each touch matters.  These paintings ultimately demonstrate that facing and working through tremendous pain always (always) brings back the positive:  large, bright, and very much alive.

Below you will find just a sampling of some of the pieces in this series: