It's Not All About Love

Image, Painting and Love

“But why do you bother about that nose?, just let it be” scowled Joe, as he got increasingly impatient with the fact that Catherine spent more and more time with the painting than him, ever since she started working on the self-portrait.

“Joe, you do not understand, in a painting the object of the painting matters, because there are only objects in a painting, only objects” - repeated Catherine, without bothering to give too much attention to Joe, even as she poured some orange juice into the glass kept on his writing table.

Joe was wondering about the meticulousness with which Catherine would come back to the painting every day to make a change here and there to make it ‘flawless’, as she put it.

He gently got up from his writing desk, gave her a quick hug, and went inside her studio to bring out his new SLR. He uploaded a picture of her, that he had taken the day before, and made it into his desktop background.

Joe thought about the fundamental difference between a photograph and a painting. Now it was clear to him. In a photograph, the object did not matter, as the object is always already there once the photographer frames it. What matters is the frame, which subjectivises the object. Due to this, one need not necessarily retouch a nose in a photograph, as Catherine did to her portrait.

As if reading his thoughts, Catherine came and snatched the glass of orange juice from his hand, finished it in one gulp and said -

“See Joe, although fundamentally western art starts with the assumption that painting is a subjective exercise, if one looks into the history of western painting, it is also about objectifying such personal subjectivisations. In that sense, your camera is more subjective than my painting.”

Seeing that Joe was still angry with her, Catherine forced herself on his lap and just before gently biting on his left ear said - “Joe, besides, I know that you love me more than anything else”.