The “Grief” series

After the pandemic that has created so many losses around the world - also around me here in North Italy, I felt the urgent need to express through an artwork the very powerful theme of grief. It was very important for me to see how art can be more than just forms and materials. That art is also about ideas, meanings, thinking processes and how you really get involved. After redirecting into painting after almost 40 years of analyzing as a psychologist, I somehow found there a beautiful bridging between these two worlds. A way to connect my knowledge and my artistic practice.

THE DEFINITION — The difference between an emotion, grief and mourning:

Emotion: when a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there is a 30 - 90 seconds chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. In other words, you only have a feeling for 30 - 90 seconds. Then it is over. If you continue to feel fear, anger and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you are thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry. That is resulting in your having this physiological response over and over again.

Grief: grief is the normal process of an intense sorrow and reaction to a loss (death / work / home / identity…) It can include many different feelings and body reactions. It takes much longer time to heal and happens in a very individual way. We still do not know everything around grief even with today’s technology.

Mourning: is when you take the grief you have on the inside and express it outside yourself. Think of grief as the container. It holds your thoughts, feelings, and images of your experience when someone you love dies. In other words, grief is the internal meaning given to the experience of loss. Mourning is the healing.

THE NARRATIVE — This story was told by a Priest on an island in the Danish Archipelago:

“To lose someone, to feel grief… is like a pointed triangle planted in your heart and spinning around and around. Every time it turns, it hurts so terribly that it feels like you simply cannot stand it anymore. But every time it turns (for every little step) the angles get more and more eroded... To more roundness, less painful… And finally the person you lost has become a pearl in your heart. That takes time and only you know how long.”

Few words from Georgia Krantz,
PhD and Adjunct Faculty at Sotheby’s Institute of Art:

“As I was working my way through the various parts of this series, I could not help but think about poetry. The poetry in the narrative, the poetry of the relationship between the different pieces, the poetry of that single pearl that seems to both encapsulate and refract the experience of the different parts. It causes my eye to become still and then disperses my vision back into the various parts.

This series is a powerful visual parallel to the narrative that is presented and so much more. The different weights and translucencies of the forms and the different spatial relationships between them create a sense of temporality - of an even, constant evolution of time and experience. Disrupted at moments by the straight and diagonal lines, just like in real life. So many pieces coming together in a fashion allowing for probing through, innovative exploration and novel creativity.”