Have you ever had the feeling that you and your partner are not on the same page? Perhaps one of you is trying harder than the other to make it work. Or maybe you have different relationship goals. Or maybe you’re just not a good fit and it’s hard to see and accept that fact.
It’s rare to see such complex feelings portrayed in art, but these two artists have succeeded in accomplishing a difficult feat.
Maria Kreyn’s 2012 painting Alone Together tightly focuses on the face of a woman as she embraces her partner. He tenderly buries his face in her neck; us viewers feel that he needs her. She awkwardly runs her fingers through his hair and turns her gaze away. Her face looks slightly flush, as if she has been recently crying. We sense that she longs for something more than what he can give her.
About this painting the artist says “He becomes every man and she every woman. And through that unique romantic moment, we can see this dynamic of ambivalence and duality present in us all and in all interactions–we want, let go, take, and pull away, together, yet isolated.”
I love this 2008 painting by Paul Fenniak entitled Encounter. A man and a woman have come upon one another using their detectors. She has taken off her earphones and holds her detector high while embracing; she is done searching, for she has found what she is looking for; he leaves his detector on the ground. Maybe he’s just not that into her.
Fenniak states “With enough manipulation, with light effects, things are not just a description of the outside world but they begin to symbolize something else – a subjective experience, I’m not trying to create a psychological thesis about it, I’m just trying to get images that are true to those feelings, true to those experiences.”
This is what makes Fenniak’s work in general so successful. It feels like dreaming, or rather, it feels like that hazy feeling you have difficulty describing in words, which lingers once you have woken from a dream. You cannot always remember what happened but you recognize the intense feeling deep down in your gut.
