MAKE LOVE* YOUR LAW

*love: compassion and gratitude, empathy and respect, community and tolerance, encouragement and praise, openness, truth, and integrity.

The THOUGHT:

WITH SOCIETY'S APPARENT ENDORSEMENT of the ever-increasing development of a 'pathological culture', one must ask, what is it that is missing from the lives of people that allows for such violent, rapacious, selfish, life-negating social customs to develop and be accepted as the norm? Before we can begin to contemplate the attainment of an existence of equality for all people, a respect for all life, or – in these times – dare to entertain thoughts of the seemingly unthinkable notion of world peace; we first need to individually gain a higher level of self-awareness, for each and all to dedicate one's self to a role of responsibility that protects and is in reverence of the gift of life, to unconditionally embrace the beauty of diversity, and to understand 'love' as a faculty and not as an object of desire or attachment. Surely, not until the acceptance of 'love' takes root at the individual level, will it be able to attain a foothold on a global scale.

Individually, our actions reflect a conscious or sub-conscious view of our character and reveal in each of us the level of our benevolent or malevolent orientation to life. Our social behavior, an expression of our personal values, guides our existence, determines our life-affirming or life-negating posture, and subsequently influences the development of our culture. In return, as embedded members of society, we find ourselves manipulated by the very culture that we assisted in creating and support, and as a result, our lives are subjugated within cultural prisons of our own making.

It is for us to take responsibility for our cultures life-affirming or life-negating qualities, and what appears quite obvious, is that currently the negative has the upper hand. Being gregarious creatures, we have an inherent need to feel accepted by the collective and as the evolution of pathological customs becomes the rooted fashion, so as not to feel alienated, it is required that we familiarize ourselves and (willing or unwilling), partake in such negative customs. As we do so, as negativity generates negativity, our participation in pathological customs stokes the fires of additional and greater pathological customs.

For each of us, in varying degrees, society's customs become our jailers, our subjugators. This subjugation is manifest in an unlimited variety of forms, tangible and non-tangible: alcohol, drugs, fame, fortune, vanity, ambition (ego), competition, power, conquest, pride, desire, avarice, image, status, consumption, materialism, anger, hate, immaturity, guilt, blame, illusionary fear, ignorance, nostalgia, fantasy, gossip, irrational faith, etc.

For the aware that actively seek to be unshackled from such captors, their personal struggle is to first, through truthful self-awareness, recognize that which enslaves. Is it the non-acceptance of 'love' that impedes our paths, prolonging our subjugation, and the acceptance of 'love' that liberates us? Is it the narcissistic maligned soul of the afflicted individual or the disturbed collective ego that immobilizes our ability for the acceptance of 'love'? Can we through the acceptance of 'love', with awareness and courage (which are both forms of love), confront the violence which surrounds and oppresses us and bring about an end to our subjugated suffering? Can we, by personally embracing a biophilic stance, reduce our society's necrophilic foothold? Has 'love' the ability to replace misery with joy, concealment with openness, taking with giving, apathy with empathy, necrophilia with biophilia, ennui with zest, improbity with integrity?

The IMAGERY:

The tragic, and sadly commonplace subject matter in these images is used with the intention to trigger thought, to provoke emotions, to inspire talk, and to act as a portal to an ultra-personal experience. Each of the paintings reflects a variation of subjugation and abuse being inflicted upon a victim(s) by a seen/unseen perpetrator. Amongst adults, the perpetrator and victim are often one and the same. These 'portraits' are of nameless and voiceless individuals that either don't value (love) themselves, or aren't valued (loved) by other individuals or society as a whole.

The point attempting to be addressed through these paintings (or painting – as a collective concept), is less less about the individual characters in the paintings and more about the development of a 'pathological culture' that helps sustain these heartbreaking horrors – horrors that we seemingly accept as norms and exploit and frequently sell as 'entertaining' news articles, video games, television shows, magazine fodder, and sensationalized blockbuster movies.

These images reveal three levels of victim/perpetrator: the seen recipient of abuse, the unseen accomplice that inflicts the abuse, and the collective seen/unseen society that by blindly accepting preserves the abuse.

Again, is what's missing from each of these images 'love'? Would the infusion of 'love' into any of these pictured scenarios diffuse the situation and put an end to the related hatred, self-loathing, subjugation and abuse? Could the acceptance of 'love', a 'love' based upon compassion and gratitude, empathy and respect, community and tolerance, encouragement and praise, openness, truth and integrity, initiate the vanquishing of that which subjugates us?

The ART and 'LOVE':

STYLISTICALLY, the rendering of these images emulates a child's coloring book, an activity arguably used as a building block for social conformity via creative repression. The greater our ability to stay within the lines, and later to fit into the confines of conventional customs and behavior, the greater the praise we receive. Is programmed conformity to the guidelines developed for a herd-society partly the fount of our subjugation? To remain boxed-in-by and dependent upon society's contrived binding lines, fetters our existence, stupefies our creativity and arrests our independence. The outcome being dependency-fueled anxieties.

For persons deplete of 'love', these anxieties are then either malevolently projected onto others or temporarily subdued through meaningless, momentary escapisms – escapisms that are prone to become attachment addiction-dependencies, subjugations, and abuse. Courage, acceptance of responsibility, and the opening of our hearts and minds to 'love' provides a point of embarkation on a venture of existence and creativity that takes us outside of society's captive lines, furnishing us with the strength to remove the covert shackles that bind, allowing the joyous embracement of independence.

Where liberation with the acceptance of 'love' potentially contributes – through life affirming activities – to the foundation of a healthy culture, a healthy individual, a healthy society, reckless emancipation that is absent of 'love' potentially opens a path of vulnerability to even greater chaotic, life-neglecting activities, resulting in additional addiction-dependency, subjugation and abuse, with the resulting (as we see) epidemic development of a 'pathological culture'.

Wherever we go, there shall love be - have we the courage to accept it?