"Thinking Itself Is Love - Self Portrait with Brain Tumor"

"Thinking Itself Is Love (Self Portrait with Brain Tumor)"
16 x 8" mixed media

After thinking about this project for over a year, I finally made this self portrait. I used references from my MRI scans that were taken before neurosurgery to remove a benign Meningioma brain tumor. I am doing very well, nearly two years post-op. Thank you to everyone who supported me during this most trying time of my life. I really don't know where I would be without all of you.

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how a broken heart might effect the mind and physical and mental health. Forgiveness and Love are always the answer. 

"…the heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break. But it is the break itself that makes the heart. The heart is not an organ, and neither it is a faculty. It is: that I is broken and traversed by the other where its presence is most intimate and its life is most open. The beating of the heart - rhythm of the partition of being, syncope of the sharing of singularity - cuts across presence, life, consciousness. That is why thinking - which is nothing other than the weighing or testing of the limits, the ends, of presence, of life, of consciousness - thinking itself is love."

 ~ Jean Luc Nancy, Shattered Love