Lover Triumphant

Mixed Media on Plywood, Detail 36" x 24", 2007

Belated Valentine's Day greetings. It's been a busy week. Work on the Lover's Discourse took off and I'm helping a friend clean out her deceased mother's house. Her mother had a serious compulsion to hoarding. I'm fascinated with the process and the problem. I'm writing about hoarding as a symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and as a cultural phenomenon.

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February is my least favorite month except for the 14th which is like a beautiful red cardinal in the brittle, grey landscape. I've always appreciated V Day but this year - with the Barthes project - it had a different flavor. The linguistic analysis of that state hasn't dampened my belief in the magic of love.

Roland Barthe's "The Lover's Discourse - Fragments"

Illustrations for "The Lover's Discourse", Mixed Media, 2007

Some of y'all already know this but I'm working a lot on a project to illustrate Roland Barthe's 1977 linguistic masterpiece "Fragments d'un Discours Amoreux" (or as translated in 1978 in English "A Lover's Discourse"). Wooosh. What a muthful.

I wanted to start uploading images of the 'pages' this weekend but google was not handling the traffic very well at all. It's a potent but different kind of anger you feel when customer service collapses in cyberspace.

Anyway here are the early images.

I have committed to completing 22 of the 84 Fragments for a preview on February 14th.

They will evolve enormously over the year -- till next Valentine's day. I wanted to get one story of one Fragment down because it's just so:

I was looking for a toy boat on ebay and I came across the most EMO and particularly appropriate carved toy boat. It was really a couple of 2 x 4's cut up and carved then painted red and cream. It was just like the early ebay ad campaign. The whole story is an ad campaign and the LD project is all about the meme so...

Here's the quick story and I'll provide the archival material later -

The ebay Seller's notes include the info that the kid who made it died. I bid $5.99 and got it. I asked the seller if he could tell me more about the boy. He did in such a forthright way. The boy's name was Roger Alquire from Sioux Falls. He got in a car crash in 1962 on his way home from college. If that weren't enough our ebay buddy goes on, "His mother just died last winter. Her mind was going and some how (sic) she locked herself out of the house and froze to death. They found her in the back yard laying on the side walk dead..ok hope this helps, thanks Bernie" This whole story will live a new life in the Lover's Discourse.