Barriers to Love

Barriers to Love

Digital Art & Illustration, 2016

In my on-going quest to discover my personal style, following The Mending Heart project, I created a piece called Isolation; inspired by a challenge to illustrate a memory.

I am a bi-racial person (mulatto), and in my younger life I was exposed to an enormous amount of racism and prejudice as a result of it. As I grew older and learned to ignore it, I seemingly stumbled upon a new reason for people to treat me like less of a human being in that I was also gay. Isolation was the result of those experiences – and, just as most of my art tends to be, it was on the darker and more depressing side of humanity.

But, just as before, Manny – my fiancé, suggested that I take another look at the piece from a more positive light. He inspired me to reimagine the piece from a positive angle. The result of that was Barriers to Love.

I was deeply inspired by a quote from Jalaluddin Rumi that I heard in Autism in Love (2015), a documentary on Netflix.

"Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek & find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." – Jalauddin Rumi

Barriers to Love considers all the outside world, viewed as faceless silhouettes in the background, and the colored views that society has when viewing the protagonist of the piece. The protagonist is blue because these views assert a depressing pressure on him, however, in peeling back the superficial layers we see solid gold beneath the skin.

Don’t judge a person based on what you’ve been lead to believe about them by a society that would be long since gone if we did not continue its traditions of cold-blooded hatred and discrimination.