Dear Painting,
There is something I need to tell you, I can’t hold back anymore; I need to be honest with you and myself.
I can’t see you anymore.
When we first met, it was love at first sight. I remember you looking at me from a distance across this huge empty room with white walls. I got weak in the knees and my heart started racing. But I played your game, walked past you very slowly briefly glancing at you with feigned indifference.
There was something so alluring yet impenetrable about you.
But how could I have known under just how many layers you hide. I think in all those years I have never been able to penetrate your appearances and gotten to know your true self. You remain a mystery to me, so close yet ultimately removed and unavailable.
I guess this is part of what attracted me to you. But it is no foundation for a healthy relationship – I know that now.
I have to admit you’re hot, which has made me stick around for so long. In the beginning, I was totally infatuated with you but now there is nothing but unfulfilled longing and eternal frustration. The thing is that you do not even seem to notice that you are living in your own separate reality stuck in a constant self-referential monologue about your history. You never engage with those around you, nor are you open for dialogue.
Yet you’re always trying to keep up appearances by creating an illusion of space without having any actual awareness of your own relationship within space. Have you ever noticed how manipulative and immature you are?
I guess we have already been living separate lives for a while. I feel that we do not understand each other anymore. And when you open your mouth, you only speak about yourself, the quality of the paint, the brush strokes. I can’t tell you how bored I am. It is always ‘me, me, me’, but what is beneath your shiny surface? Nothing! You are self-absorbed and shallow. It’s all about selling yourself: you’re a slave to the system.
Every time I wake up next to you, I just feel empty inside. I feel crushed by the whole weight of your history, put off by your arrogance, your emphasis on status and claims to totality. You are arrogant thinking that you are better than everyone else, just because the collectors and dealers are all over you!
I know if I just stuck with you, talked your talk I would have an easy ride. A few pretty colours, cool, slightly detached abstraction, some sweet talking about de-construction this, semiotics that and I would soon be invited to all the cool parties. But I just can’t compromise myself any longer.
We have such different emotional needs, which we will never be able to meet for each other. Right now I just want to be free to see other people, like installation, drawing, maybe even sound. Do I have commitment issues? I just don’t want to be put in a box or defined in relation to your history anymore. It makes me feel like I am nothing without you, like I have no existence outside of you.
Perhaps I have a love-hate relationship with you. In a way, I am addicted to you. My therapist calls it co-dependency. She says that I need you because my anger and disappointment drives me, that my identity is intrinsically caught up with you as I am defining myself against you. Perhaps this has to do with my relationship with my father, modernism. I am trying to rebel against him by rejecting you, yet I know I am a part, a product of him. Maybe I need to accept this before I can move on.
I have no regrets about us. I have learnt a lot about myself while we were together and it’s all about process, growth. There are no shortcuts. I still love you and I always will. But love is not enough. Perhaps at some point in the future we can be friends again. Right now though, I have to move on.
Take care,
Sandra
