Alexandra Eldridge - "Heart to Heart"
24" x 20" Acrylic on canvas
Jane Lillian Vance wrote this poem to accompany VALENTINE:
"We lock eyes here with a resolute being. She is not the commissioned dove who brought the olive branch to Noah’s ark and then had no further part in the story.
She has lived independent of such a tidy and limited role.
Her mind has considered the distant past: ancient cities and their contributions, logic, philosophy, what constitutes beauty, the art on amphoras.
In her own past she has sat as part of many a living tableau vivant, at privileged dinner tables, with long pastel blue linen runners, among gold and silver conversation. These memories color the back of her mind but never have domesticated her.
Look at her reflection in that whirling pool of truth beneath her. At heart, she is more great-horned owl than dove, adaptive, powerful.
What Walt Whitman exclaimed in Song of Myself fits her: “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
After all, the beginning of her wild nest is a beak-full of seaweed situated atop a poppy pod, full of the brown seeds of delirious joy. The long-stemmed white flower has bent to offer her this bower.
Except for a pink parasol-turned-mountain, whose lava hints at fuchsia, there has never been one quite like her."