#4. Captured heart (aka "Brothers must do it for themselves")
The giclee print for sale on the site called “You have captured my heart” was published in an article titled “Brothers must do it for themselves- why boys need emotional rescue”.
The painting that appears on the site as a giclee print differs extensively to the painting which was used as an illustration. While going through a phase of collecting little objects that caught my eye for one reason or another, putting them in bottles or jars with fluid, and drawing their refracted view, I was reading a book in which it was described, as part of the mummifying process, how the Ancient Egyptians stored each of the corpse’s organs in a separate jar (I think it was in the opening chapter of Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer, although that's not really important). As a consequence I made a doodle similar to the one on the left, which is taken from the page of initial sketches for “Captured heart” (I’ve no idea where the original is but the memory of it stayed with me and resurfaced when I read the article it helped illustrate).
The writer attends a work related course about dealing with domestic violence from a counsellor’s point of view. A tough and hard hitting presentation drilled home the message that violence is never acceptable except in the rare case of self-defence. He is left with the disturbing understanding that all the other course attendees (who were women) believed that all men needed to be educated on this matter. He then gives examples to acknowledge that there are sections of society where violence is a self perpetuating way of life, in which women are traditionally disempowered to a greater extent than men since escape is tougher when you have children to fend for. He also acknowledges that women who have undergone a tough upbringing often endure violent relationships as adult because they either don’t believe they have a choice or don’t believe they deserve any better. It is women in these circumstance that the course he attended focuses on, addressing the process of increasing their self-esteem , changing their expectations and educating them.
“But what about the men in these relationships?” wonders the writer. He states that apart from psychopaths most men know deep down that a relationship has hit the rocks when violence rears its ugly head. What ever the cause, be it alcoholism, infidelity, depression, when violence is resorted to it is more often than not due to an inability to express powerful emotions any other way. He points out that this is one attribute where women can definitely claim to hold power over men, that is their degree of emotional literacy.
He feels that a large proportion of boys and young men are not taught the words to express their emotions, so not being encourage to discuss them as boys quickly teaches them that doing so is a sign of weakness. In conclusion he argues that although women in these circumstances need all the help they can get, to break the cycle the emotional problems of the men also need to be addressed.
The obvious route of the problems discussed in the article was violence perpetrated by men on women, and because he argued that the underlying cause in the majority of these cases was the man’s inability to articulate consuming emotions anyway other than through the fist it seemed appropriate to address this as the theme for the accompanying illustration. I wanted the image to appear as part of a set of questionable instructions for boys on how to be the kind man fashioned by social stereotyping. It is suppose to resemble a card I used to get as a kid with a packet of bubble gum, this card being number five in the series dealing with how to handle emotions. In case you can not make it out the text at the bottom of the card / illustration reads “Collect all ten top tips and you too can become a fully dysfunctional male (batteries not inc.)”. I always felt that the image worked well but I wanted to see if I could change the mood of it by changing the context while keeping the same core imagery, which is how I ended up with the giclee print “You have captured my heart”.
