Two Hearts Together

Acrylic on 3-D Shaped Stretched Canvas

66" x 94" x 6.5"

168 cm x 239 cm x 17 cm

The Story Behind Two Hearts Together

I know it’s unfashionable, but I’m a romantic. But I guess that’s part of my melancholic artistic temperament. I’m extremely blessed by a long love and romance with the woman of my dreams, and I always wanted to find a way to express it visually in a painting.

It took me many months to imagine a way to express my love in the material terms of a painting. Once I had the concept, not of a large heart, but of two large hearts joined together, it took me hours and hours to engineer a design that I could build. It had to be large, eight feet wide, three dimensional, yet lightweight so I could actually hang it on a wall.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you can find hearts in lots of shapes, some taller than wide, some wider than tall, some fat, some thin. I spent many hours choosing proportions that would work in three dimensions and that would look good when you couldn’t see the entire heart because the two hearts would be joined. And the joint had to be strong enough to hold together while it hangs on the wall for a couple of hundred years.

I spent many days on the carpentry of cutting out the shapes and building the stretcher framework in four pieces for the canvas. Stretching canvas over curves is always a time-consuming challenge.

I spent hours pouring over color charts to choose the right shade of red, the one that would signify true love. Finally I painted it with that shade of red and then assembled the entire painting.

I put my heart and soul into this piece. I want the person who purchases it to know how valuable it is to me. It represents a year’s work.

View my video, "Creating Two Hearts Together" by clicking here.