Theories of Love is, as implied by the title, a witty explication of ideas from centuries of Western thinking about the concept of romantic love, or Eros. Each painting in this series puts a wry contemporary spin on a historic philosophy or theory about love and sexuality. Andreas Capellanus, for example, wrote his “Treatise on Courtly Love” a thousand years ago, but the idea that “thou shalt remain chaste for thou whom thou lovest” lingers in contemporary ideas of “pure” and “true” love, the subject of the painting “Love According to Capellanus.” The contemporary idea that love can be attributed to hormones and pheromones and can, like everything else, be reduced to its chemical properties is the theory addressed in the piece, “Biochemistry of Love.” “Love According to Sappho” interrogates the erotic and militaristic overtones of Sapphic poetry. Foucault’s treatise concerning power dynamics in sexual relationships backgrounds the piece called “Love According to Foucault.” Each of these theories of what it means to love and how love happens is juxtaposed in my work with art historical references and icons of contemporary pop culture, designed to engage the viewer in a conversation that traverses culture, time and experience.

The narrative aspects of connecting history to current thought and experience, technological change, and cultural iconography in my work are derived from my desire to engage the viewer/reader in an imaginative process that incorporates a span of discourses embedded in images. I hope to challenge the viewer to build overlapping and contiguous story lines that will both reveal and confound those unusually unexamined ideas.