Bittersweet

Bittersweet is the emotion that holds two truths at once and refuses to let go of either.

When Whitney Houston recorded I Will Always Love You for the 1992 film The Bodyguard, she transformed a song Dolly Parton had originally written as a gentle farewell into something altogether more devastating. A vocal performance so technically extraordinary and so emotionally unguarded that it became one of the best-selling singles in recorded history. But what made it immortal was not the power of the voice. It was the specificity of the feeling. “And I will always love you.” Not I love you still. Not I wish things were different. Always, a word that exists outside of time, that refuses the comfort of closure, that insists on carrying the love forward even as the relationship is released. That is bittersweet in its purest form.

That refusal to choose between love and letting go is the emotional center of this painting.

Bittersweet is among the most mature of human emotions because it demands the full development of the self to tolerate. It is the simultaneous presence of joy and sorrow, the ache of the beautiful thing that is also ending, the gratitude for what was given held tenderly alongside the grief of what cannot last. Children want things to be one or the other. It takes real living, real loss, real love that did not survive the conditions it needed, to learn that the most meaningful experiences are almost always both at once.

Houston’s own life was the living embodiment of that duality. The most gifted voice of her generation, celebrated and consumed in equal measure by an industry and a public that loved her enormously and protected her insufficiently. Her relationship with Bobby Brown, her struggles with addiction, the slow erosion of the instrument that had made her extraordinary. All of it played out in public, bittersweet in the most painful sense, beauty and sorrow so intertwined they became indistinguishable. She was found in a Beverly Hills hotel room in February 2012 at 48, and the world grieved with the particular ache that only bittersweet can produce. The simultaneous celebration of what was and the devastation of what was lost.

The symbols etched into the rock-like formations of this work transcribe fragments of her lyrics as permanent inscription a love letter pressed into stone, neither fully released nor fully held, existing in the exact emotional space the word bittersweet was invented to describe.

Ultimately bittersweet is inseparable from gratitude. The deep recognition that the sweetness would not be sweet without the bitter, that the beauty of any love, any experience, any life is made more luminous by its own impermanence. The grief is the measure of the gift.

“I will always love you.” Not despite the ending. Because of everything that made the ending mean something.

This piece asks: What in your life are you learning to hold with both hands? The beauty and the breaking, at the same time?