I started painting 1 month ago, so please forgive my shortcomings as a painter. I only wish to express what I feel, I have not taking lessons, but I am starting to enjoy it a lot. This is the first painting that I really feel I painted without thinking. It is called All and Everything.
Because what I wanted to say is that woman is, for many of us, the all of all, the all and the everything.
The model in this painting is my wife, Isabella, and today we celebrate 13 years of marriage. I have given everything I am to make our marriage an adventure filled with love. Together, we have lived through intense years, trials, change, pain, learning, and redemption. And the more I walk beside her, the less I feel like a hero, and the more I discover myself to have been the one rescued.
That is why, in the painting, my hand tries to reach her. It wants to touch her, graze her, arrive at her. It wants to express love, wonder, devotion. But that same hand also carries another truth: it is the hand of a man. And I do not cease to be a man. At times it seems like a caress; at times it seems like a threat. At times it seeks to love; at times it seems to possess, suffocate, control. In that ambiguity lies the heart of the work.
Woman has been, for man, the origin of beauty, desire, tenderness, inspiration, and meaning. Because of women, we have written poems, composed songs, built empires and destroyed them, painted canvases, taken photographs, made promises, fought wars, prayed, worked, dreamed, fallen to our knees, and begun again and again in every way history has allowed words to be combined. Women have been mother, lover, wife, daughter, refuge, memory, and hope. They have been presence and absence. Above all, they have been motive.
And yet, in that same history of love, admiration, and dependence, our deepest shame is also written.
Because we men, who so often say we love women, have also been their most constant aggressors. We have objectified them. We have reduced them to the body, to silence, to the role that suits us. We have imposed impossible rules on them; we have built a world where they may even come to judge themselves through the eyes with which we have judged them. We have hit them, humiliated them, silenced them, stalked them, manipulated them, raped them, drugged them, used them, abandoned them, and murdered them. We have loved them monstrously. We have wanted them close, but not always free. We have wanted them ours, instead of wanting them whole.
This brutal contradiction obsesses me: women are so much for us men, you mean so much, you stir so much within us, that even today we still have not finished learning how to love you without hurting you, without invading you, without controlling you, without fearing you. And in that failure, some men end up broken, confused, or driven mad, because they do not know how to love without possessing, do not know how to admire without demanding, do not know how to need without destroying.
I believe that to truly love a woman is not to have her. It is not to confine her. It is not to dim her in order to feel her close. To love a woman is to learn, every day, not to turn love into weight, nor closeness into fear, nor devotion into prison. To all women, I wish you a patient, free, dignified, and safe love, and the grace to teach, through that love, the man beside you how to love you. It is the same kind of love with which my wife, through her patience, her light, and her truth, has taught me to love her throughout these 13 years of marriage.
What a great adventure it has been to love you every day, Isabella Ibanez. You are the love of my life, as I tell you every single day. How proud I am of the love we have built together. How happy it makes me to know that, even though I am a man, you have been able to live your life at my side without constant fear.
Happy anniversary, my love. I love you so much that all these words and all these brushstrokes are nothing more than the air that carries a sigh for you.