blog — Artist Lucas Novak

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable… A quote by C.S. Lewis.

The notion of being vulnerable might sound like weakness, but knowing the vulnerabilities exist and embracing them fully makes a person strong. To be vulnerable is to be real, for even the strongest, such as tigers, are vulnerable. In the series One Hundred Years Of Solitude, my art focuses on certain themes central to our emotional and social existence and what makes us human.

The painting is not a depiction of a fantasy. The subjects can be interpreted as metaphors for the fragilities of life — maybe not actual tigers crossing our path, but rather the impediments, emptiness, imminent dangers, deaths, and waning memories, that we all, if we’re being truthful, must inevitably encounter in life, and through which we must make decisions and push forward.

It was hotter than hell. Their feet burned as they kicked through the sand. Sweat dripped and their sunglasses slipped to the tips of their noses. The coolers were heavy but necessary; when the temperature exceeded 105 degrees they would be rewarded for their extra efforts. When they reached the river's edge they loaded their rafts. They left behind the lurid architecture and floated without motor or sail along the currents that carved about rocky cliffs and muddy banks.

Always moving yet going nowhere, atop the cold water, beneath the boiling sun, they found refuge in their intermission, taking no lead in their direction, allowing the world to pass at its discretion.

24" x 19", oil pastel, acrylic, and colored pencil on paper, 2015

They met a dolphin wallowing in the river and fed it cherries and sangria. It laughed and splashed them. They joined it in the channel, cooling their heads and washing their bodies of the grease marks from the machines. They found moments of clarity in the clear water, or upon their bubbles of air among the nameless lulling waves, floating like wise spirits on soft clouds to the inevitable structure at the end of the respite.

(For more info about the Intermission paintings, click HERE.)