#45

On Valentines

“So, why Valentines?” she asks, innocently.

I wince, stutter and quietly mutter, “It’s a long story.”

Debbie Reynolds as Kathy Selden in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly.

How am I to express my quest for love, in the knowledge that for the last seven years I was experiencing possession? In the days and months following that torturous break, I felt desperate to know, dear reader, a true and unwavering love; the kind present in the Valentines cards of the Victorian age. Plush doves in bundles of silken ribbon, a rosy-cheeked cherub launching its arrow to thine heart. Instead, I became accustomed to love-bombing, emotional coercion, and the fated belief that it was all my fault.

In amongst my bookcase, angel, a text which I am aptly ridding, How to Be an Artist by American art critic Jerry Saltz. Within it, as a forlorn sort of bookmark, a nineteen-thirties Valentine I’d sourced for that vampire. Prophetically, it reads: Aw gee! Don’t string me along like you do. Are you gonna be my Valentine? On its reverse, a hand-scrawled love note beneath another dead lover’s calligraphic script (‘To Jenny, from Felipe’). Lost and deluded, within my words I address him and profess, ‘…To make up for my many mistakes.’

I remember obsessively, in the not-too-distant-past, combing through bell hooks’ seminal text All About Love in a desperate need to see and feel all that I was missing. She tells me that love is a concerted act, an effort one tends to day by day, as though willing a rose bush to bloom. While I’ve now found love quite generously - a hand to hold, lips to kiss, a home-cooked meal deep in my belly, babe - I feel fixated by the ways in which we historically express love, materially, with the human hand as the main purveyor.

Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar-wai.

There is an elaborate and unabashed beauty in the arts and crafts of the Victorian age, no less so for their harmonious application of several distinct specialisms: embossing, chromolithographic printing, gilding and paper lace, not explicitly employed in that order. The pride of many British manufacturers, including the famous Dobbs and Co., George Mansell, and George Kershaw and Sons, these highly decorative works take influence from Persian design principles, in their use of ornamental quatrefoil, filigree and tessellation.

What I wish to do, dear reader, is marry these techniques seamlessly, threading through contemporary ruminations on love and loss in all its foul-tasting bitterness. Pushing my head down / Pulling my jaw apart / Sporadic intensity / Reluctant apologies, a note in my phone reads from twenty-nineteen. I dread the thought.

Much love, care and adoration goes into the production of 18th century Valentines, whether mass manufactured for public sale or carefully hand-crafted for private use. Poems printed onto silk, with soft crescents of artificial foliage framing a babe, a bird or an angel. Mine heart sings to look upon them. Valentines, and by extension almost any and all Victorian ephemera fascinates me, for it only exists in physical form in the palm of a clean, gloved hand. If not for it being safely stored and cared for in the collections of Birmingham Museum, these objects would return to the Earth, to never have existed.

I think of the dead who comprised these Valentines, never to know that their works would be so speculated upon, so cherished and desired. I, too, wish to craft objects with this degree of care and intimacy. A calligraphic hand style in midnight blue, professing thine love, divine and true.

Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot (1959) dir. Billy Wilder.

These expressions of affection have become increasingly rare. Through the mass mechanisation of Valentines cards often outsourced overseas in favour of cheap labour - disposable designs which can be cycled through like wildfire - contemporary Valentines lack love. With the proliferation of social media, physical tokens of affection are inadvertently replaced by likes, favourites, or the ultimate digitised signifier of true love, the heart emoji. The digital space opens up a realm of opportunity to send and receive love differently; in that same breath, the artisanal craft of the Valentine evidently becomes lost to time.

While I look to print with silken paper and craft mine own distinct cursive script, swathes of saved ephemera rest before me, procured from the depths of eBay. Chromolithographic ‘scraps’, many of which were - and continue to be - manufactured in Germany, comprise of traditionally Romantic motifs. These motifs, largely drawing upon the beauty of the natural world, offer a richly sumptuous and layered meaning within any given work. Red roses for passionate love, fruit in abundance as ripe emblems of fertility and financial prosperity, and small children as expressions of careless youth and joy.

These scraps, machine embossed and die cut, can be collaged in near-infinite compositions. Often adhered with additional ‘tabs’, they are then peeled back to reveal a hidden message to the chosen recipient. Frail and delicate little things, chromolithographic scraps were sought after collectibles, from which the term ‘scrapbook’ originally heralds.

Laura Harring and Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive (2001) dir. David Lynch.

I long to love and touch in real life. Fixated by screens, I often find myself lamenting on the lack of physical connection and communication I experience in the home, the workplace, and the wider world. The dominant social media platforms operate on an attention economy, bleaching our dopamine receptors beyond recognition, and leaving us wanting, insatiably so. It is curious how I can hold unfettered access in the palm of mine hand to every person I’ve ever known and loved, and yet still I feel debilitated by an intense, profound loneliness.

I look to a future now immersed in love through craft. Craft as a culmination of one’s worldly affections. I imagine this future, especially, within the context of these fraught letters to thee, now near approaching five years on. Emotional Outbursts has been a child of grief, seeped in longing for connection with others. Now that connection has begun to blossom beyond the page, I am considering the ways in which I can take this work into the physical world, through the art of calligraphy, letter writing and fine paper crafts.

Romance has, and continues to be, gently nestled at the core of my practice. I wish for that romance to be evident within the ink, the paper, the ribbon and the cloth. Ceremoniously so, just as the Victorians would have wished.