Recent Paintings
There are many mythologies that have the world created by desire. In Hesiod’s cosmogony, Eros, the god of desire, is the first to emerge after Chaos and Earth. To do anything, to create anything, to act at all, you need to desire to do it. It is the Prime Mover in the way that anything that moves needs to desire to move, so the first motion must have been desire itself. I wanted to depict this desire not only between Shiva and Parvati, but I also wanted to ignite desire in the viewer as well. Because desire isn’t just wanting something a lot. Our modern version of it has actually distilled it down quite a bit, and even the sexiest representations of it are as hollow as a lingerie store by the same name. Desire is a cosmic fire, something so deep that the path of your world rewrites itself to match it. And that’s the power between these two forces, these two deities. Their desire for each other is what brings the world into being and what keeps reaching into the vastness of nothing to connect. One cannot exist without the other.
In the collection of Elizabeth Pugh.