Love Is A War

I am not a particularly artistic gal. Stick figures and smiley faces are generally the full extent of my talents. But every so often I get a creative urge to put pencil to paper - not to draw, but to stencil. Some years ago I stumbled onto MadeByJulene, the blog and portfolio of an incredibly talented woman. Julene creates the most exquisite paper-cuts, all done entirely by hand. I was immediately drawn not only to the beauty of her pieces but to the concept of paper-cutting as art. After trying my hand at tracing a few of her pieces, I started designing my own.

I started small, but quickly started working on more elaborate designs. I have a very technically-driven mind, so the planning and drawing of the stencils delighted me. Obviously, the key to creating a stencil is that it needs to flow - either the positive space or the negative space needs to be continuous. I found the challenge of figuring out how to connect all the pieces to be fun! I became obsessed. On my down time at the bank I worked at I was drafting stencils. Late into the night when I got home I was bent over my desk, carefully slicing them out. In a manner of weeks my fingers developed calluses from the blade, but I could not be stopped. Lines from movies, books, songs, all stuck in my head and I began to see words as stencils and fonts in my head. Insane, I know.

So when I found this poem by Pablo Neruda, I fell absolutely in love and knew I had to make a stencil of it.

And because I'm a tremendous sap of a woman, I backed it with some olive cardstock, framed it and gave it to C.

Carnal Apple, Woman Filled, Burning Moon
Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars, 
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight, 
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.

Pablo Neruda