Love Letter #8

My love, 

 

I’m sorry you’re low. I know how it is. I don’t mean to recede. It scares me this thing we've got going on. I’m not good with fast moving vehicles and points of no return. I always keep my helmet on and my eyes straight ahead. I had a dream about that other person I used to love last night—we were on a swing set and it felt close, so close, and then I realized what was happening, that I was falling into something that looked like an ocean but was actually an emotional tar pit and I woke up. 

 

Yuck. I’m still covered in the stuff. Had a great conversation with Preston Buchtel the other day after you called. He has such a gentle presence and part of why I wanted to speak to him was because he made photographs of nude women that didn’t piss me off, which, as you know is rare. At one point he openly invited me to let him know if his work was crossing any lines. I appreciated his candor and his awareness of my own subjectivity in relation to his work.  He has a series called “I wanted to meet you in the trees but the world got in the way," which, as I looked at it reminded me of you, of you and me and that time you took my picture out West and I hated it till I loved it. Preston defined intimacy along two lines—a close conversation with oneself and then an invitation for a viewer to converse with the work. I thought it was curious that he used conversation as a metaphor for intimacy as a visual artist but, like Ryan Dewey, he seemed interested in the exchange between objects and people, though perhaps not quite so tangibly. 

 

So we can add that to the definitions of intimacy:

 

  • proximity (me)
  • mutual need (Liz Maugans)
  • Intersubjectivity (Ryan Dewey)
  • the romance of the painting process (Michelangelo Lovelace)

Am I getting somewhere? I can tell you feel far away from me. Can you come visit? You’re right there’s no ocean here but I am. I'm spinning just thinking about you:

 

 

Love, 

K