The heart
The hearts are often the centrepiece of my artworks. Did you know that the word for ‘heart’ in Italian is ‘cuore’? (cuore also means “core”). And so the heart really is the core of my work I suppose.
I usually draw my hearts cadmium red. I started off doing them light and dark cadmium red because that’s all I had. Now I either do them in medium or dark cadmium red with a cadmium purple right atrium.
When I started drawing hearts I drew them like everybody else, much closer to being anatomically correct. I originally started doing hearts because I heard Meryl Streep quote Carrie Fisher and said, “Take your broken heart, make it into art.”
“Take your broken heart, make it into art.”
And so that’s literally what I did. I illustrated my heartbreak as best as I could, I felt it was almost like a betrayal. You can buy my earliest heart lino prints (albeit over on Etsy) here.
But as I got over that, I no longer felt any pain, so I had to change the way I depicted the heart. To differentiate myself from others. I also felt the way I drew them initially was too complex. So I removed the veins (you can still see their presence in earlier works such as this one or this one).
I am somewhat inspired by logo design, so I looked at the heart more or less with a logo designer’s eyes. I tried to take some of the features of the heart and simplify them so that it was still recognisable. I began to draw my hearts differently. Now they are generally diamond-shaped, with only four off-white coloured valves and one atrium showing.
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