Heartbreak

Heartbreak is not just the loss of another person. It is the loss of the version of yourself that existed inside the love.

When Prince released When Doves Cry in the summer of 1984, he did something audacious even by his own standards. He stripped the bassline entirely, leaving the song suspended in something skeletal and strange, all exposed nerve and space. The effect was intentional. Heartbreak does not fill the room. It empties it. “This is what it sounds like when doves cry.” Prince did not describe heartbreak. He sonically reproduced it, giving listeners the architecture of grief without the safety of explanation.

That absence is the emotional center of this painting.

Heartbreak lives at the intersection of love and loss, and what makes it singular among human emotions is that it cannot exist without its opposite. You cannot be heartbroken by something that did not matter. This is why it hurts differently than disappointment, differently than failure, because heartbreak is always a measure of how deeply you were willing to belong to someone or something. Prince understood this. His music was always about desire and its inevitable complications the sacred and the carnal, the given and the withheld.

The symbols pressed into the rock-like formations of this work carry fragments of his lyrics as permanent inscription, the words of a man whose singular genius did not protect him from the ordinary devastation of being human. Prince’s death in April 2016, from an accidental fentanyl overdose at 57, silenced a voice that had spent decades making vulnerability sound like power.

This piece asks: What have you loved enough to grieve?