Fierce Loving
“Bitterness is like cancer.
It eats upon the host.
But anger is like fire.
It burns it all clean.”
Maya Angelou
The topic of this workshop is the fierce side of love: to truly love, we have to be up for being passionate, disturbing the peace and giving our wild-hearted nature some breathing space. It takes a certain fierceness of the heart to stand your ground, disagree with others, defend innocence, and make a difference in the world. To be fiercely loving is to wield the emotional energy often called ‘anger’ in a skilful way, in service to life and love.
To invoke the topic of anger and passion, I wanted to have something in the installation that carries the quality of unpredictability and expansion, so I worked with acrylic spray. This way, I couldn’t plan the images thoroughly. I drew silhouettes of human bodies, cut them out of paper and sprayed them around. I also captured the lines of branches and plants with the spray.
The circle as a holding structure appearing at certain places balances the expansive flow of the paint. Adam’s passionate teaching style and the workshop’s topic both invited a clean, red, black and white colour scheme.