The Heated Heart - from Cheryl Penn

[Marie Wintzer]

 

Heart Matters so much that it needed a few additional boekies from Cheryl, and I am the VERY lucky owner of one of them! As Cheryl says, the more it Matters, the Better.
With ensuing Consequences.

 

 

Every time Cheryl has used thick red string for binding a book I have imagined them to represent veins and arteries. Using them here along with thin red thread is making so much sense to me. They are the Flow of Life, the Heart's supply.

 

 

The Heated Heart. Red, of course. Ever burning. Passionately so. The Realm of the King of Hearts. It is his Territory, isn't it. The One Who Heats the Heart of Her that Lies (/Lies) Asleep, it is Him. He is the One who Reigns unfailingly upon his Kingdom, his only Presence enough to heat up the whole of it.

 

 

So the Heated Heart is Red. But it is far from being straightforward. There are other Sides, there are other Colors. The Heated Heart can be Blue, and probably as Blue as it is Red. I would say that you can't have one without the other.

Convoluted. Never smooth, never levelled, never plain, never one dimensional.
Intricate, coiled, twisted, involved, sometimes confused.
One of my favorite things is to look up definitions of a word, it is sometimes surprising how one single word can have a long list of interesting definitions to it. Two of them that I quite like for Convolution:
- a particularly complex anatomical part of a living thing.
- an action that changes the shape of something.

 

 

The Journey to Heated Hearts has the characteristic shape of an ECG. We can follows its evolution all along the pages of the book. Ups or downs, so many Questions are Sown, so many Seeds of Dreams are Sewn. The Path seems to be ending with a flatline across the Burdened Heart, which is a bit worrying, but I'll interpret this a temporary time out.

 

 

On the other Side of the Burdened Heart lies the Pin Up. A Pin Up mercilessly Pinned Down right in the middle of her chest. A strategic spot to pin down someone, needless to say. Here again there are several aspects to being pinned down. Immobilized, Suppressed, Dependent, a trade off for Secured, Safe, Stable?

 

 

Maybe I am not entirely convinced with what I was writing about pins, because being pinned down certainly hurts no matter what the context is. Which inevitably leads us to Wounds, a recurrent theme in Cheryl's work. We know that Heat is a good thing, it keeps us warm, it makes us feel good, but at the same time it is not difficult to imagine which devastating effects Heat can have on a Heart. And yet, strangely, I am not sure that the Heart is ready to give up Heat in exchange for a Woundless skin.

 

 

In a note to accompany the book, Cheryl quotes a few lines by T.S. Eliot, from the wonderful Waste Land:


"Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
 

Od' und leer das Meer."

Desolate and empty is the sea. Isolde's ship nowhere to be seen on the horizon. Only a lingering feeling of Nothingness, of Emptiness. Facing the Light, Love, Beauty, the overwhelmed Heart has lost its Words.

Today... well, that's how it is Today, says the note. 
Today the Heart might be Blue but that won't keep it from being a Heated Heart. There are a lot more Pages to be written and the Journey is still long. Just know it Matters, and how much it Matters....

 

[De Villo Sloan]

Fascinating views on Marilyn. I'm connecting her to Emily Townsend's Goddess call. 

 

My point was - we can find ancient art depicting all kinds of women deities. Cheryl's work really makes me think that when Ray Johnson, Warhol, and others started using popcult figures in their art - Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn - they were commenting that we still have these deities, just in another form. We need them. But, really, they were just ordinary people. So you end up with the situation where Norman Mailer tried and tried to fathom what made Marilyn Monroe different - to no avail. It might be some paradox of democracy too - the insistence that everyone is equal - yet some have these divine qualities. 

[Nancy Bell Scott]

You are right on about that in my opinion, Diane. Imagine going through life with zero anonymity, fighting like crazy for a moment of solitude and no-influence, and almost always failing. Then reaching "the top," and finding out there isn't much there of true nourishment. Fear of this probably makes many people poor self-marketers, and for good reason.

[Katerina Nikoltsou (MomKat)]

Beautiful photos and thought-provokig blog, Marie. It so highlights the beauty of Cheryl's art. It is amazing to see and read, and imagine holding this and handling each page/fold-out in its journey to Heated Hearts. Stunning!

[DKeys]

I think often the trade off for fame and fortune IS premature death. They live hard and fast in an essentially fabricated world, make their mark like a comet streaking across the sky, then self combust. They essentially 'quit' when they're ahead. I think they attain everything that society tells us should bring  peace and happiness, and when it doesn't the bottom falls out. But that's just my 2 sense.

[cheryl penn]

I agree with you there :-) - I wrote a whole paper on 'the immortals' - ONLY so because they died young - if they'd all got old and wrinkly and crabby - they would not have been living dead icons for sure :-) X

[DKeys]

Marilyn was so wounded from having a crazy mother. She became so iconic that no one ever saw her for who she was. Kind of like rich people who never know if someone is befriending them for their money and status only. They projected all these ideals onto her. I always thought she was most beautiful when she was just Norma Jean-natural beauty. Had she lived, I don't think she would have dealt well with aging. Her whole identity became wrapped up in her appearance.

[De Villo Sloan]

I think you have something working with manufactured, exploitive, objectified images vs. real people in flesh and blood. Also - there's that whole mail-art blog devoted to it - you have an exploration of The Goddess - sacrificial images, not unlike Karen Champlin's piece. Must be in the air.

[cheryl penn]

Beauty can be a trap I guess. That Pin-Ups life? It has to be one of the saddest things. She was ultimately pinned down by her heart. Like a living pinned butterfly on a display board.

[DKeys]

The pinned down pin-up speaks volumes-makes a point in the most stripped down way

[Nancy Bell Scott]

Cheryl's work and Marie's pix and post -- extra-nice work and interpretation -- are so rich that another hour or so will be required later for absorption. And clearly it will be worth it.