🇬🇧 Art: Love is a Mess

Let's talk about art. Today I want to comment on the work "Love is a mess". You can see the work in the highlights of my Nycka Nunes profile on Instagram. If it is available, you can also purchase it.

I am Nycka Nunes, visual artist, and in this blog I talk about my artistic work and other services that I provide to contribute to other people and companies and raise more financial resources to make art.

"Love is a mess" was a work I created while I was reflecting and questioning the common view of love and romantic relationships and how it hinders the process of experiencing authentic love.

The short version of the reasoning is to see each red dot in the image as a lesson learned through experiences and reflections on the topic. I didn't count how many points there were and each person certainly has a different amount of learning on the topic. Quantity is irrelevant in this context. With this in mind, I sought to create an image that referred, without any anatomical precision, to a beating heart.

Let's delve deeper.

With the internet and globalisation we have more access to different cultures, meeting people with varied experiences and values. I believe this is very positive for creating a repertoire and understanding that life is not a multiple choice test where there is only one right answer to each question. This limited vision, of seeing the values ​​we inherited from our family as the only right ones, prevents us from creating real bonds, because we never accept other values. We just label different values ​​as wrong.

Yesterday I read something that illustrates this well. Someone questioned how Finns can go to saunas completely naked without getting an erection. I'm Brazilian, passionate about Finnish culture. And I know that their relationship with nudity is very different from a Brazilian's relationship with the subject. In Brazil, for example, there are very few nudist beaches, in a country with a huge coastal area. Brazilian culture creates a taboo regarding nudity and sexualises it. On the other hand, Finnish culture sees nudity as something natural. I understand this as acceptance of one's own body, first and foremost. None of us were born with clothes on. Clothes are mainly worn for two reasons: protection and self-expression. Personal style is mainly related to the function of self-expression (at least in the way I work). This culture of creating a taboo around nudity makes Brazilians' minds tend to associate nudity with sex, creating a moralistic and hypocritical sense of shame in showing their bodies. As far as I know, the same happens in some other cultures (the question was from an Italian).

And what does this taboo regarding sex and nudity have to do with romantic relationships, which is the theme of the work I'm commenting on today?

Firstly, the question demonstrates ignorance towards Finnish culture, as if the person asking believed that everyone in the whole world has the same values ​​as him (or her). This demonstrates a very narrow worldview, which is the basis of countless prejudices.

Many cultures also emphasise a hierarchy of love and this is related to how they deal with sex. They see the love of a couple as something different from the love between siblings, between friends, between parents and children, between a person and their pet. Furthermore, they place monogamous relationships and sex within these relationships as more important than friendships and other "forms" of love. Interestingly, love is the only feeling that has so many categories, perhaps because the categorisation comes from a certain inability to understand feelings combined with a moralistic religious culture that only people who have never studied religion try to maintain. Leaving aside people who try to wage a war of suffering, thinking that their suffering is greater than that of others, I have never seen, for example, anyone think that the joy of passing the desired entrance exam is different from the joy of winning a sports competition or the joy of seeing a friend who was having problems finally overcome them.

And that's why we have, from an early age, a distorted view of love, a view that, at least for many women, makes marriage a life goal.

There are so many beliefs that many inherit and never question! And throughout our love experiences (here I'm referring to dating, marriages and the like), not everyone stops to evaluate the role of these beliefs in the failure of their relationships. It is easier to blame others - an attitude that commonly reveals immaturity - than to evaluate one's own beliefs and attitudes to see if there is something there that should be reevaluated.

The mass media limits itself to talking about common options, creating scripts where the girl has to choose who she wants to marry. Anyone who realises that living this narrative does not work in their own lives needs to look for other sources to learn about options. As an artist, and fortunately an artist who has built a wide repertoire in various fields of interest, I feel comfortable offering art lovers and supporters other options that the mass media usually doesn't talk about.

Speaking of supporters, get to know my project "The Many Nuances of Love" and make your contribution to this virtual exhibition. Maybe it will open doors for your love life to be more successful.

Nycka Nunes