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The Ecstasy of Madam Dolorosa
From the artist: “This painting is a self-portrait that uses Christian symbolism to speak about love and the pain of its loss. Traditionally the Sacred Heart is used to show the pain that Mary suffered in the sacrifice of her son and the love that Christ had for humanity. In this painting this imagery is used to show the folly of the pursuit of love and how distorted and exaggerated a person’s feelings become when one is ‘in love’ and has his or her heart broken. "The painting depicts a woman in an histrionic emotional state. The distortion and exaggeration of the painting’s elements are used to express how she feels inside, which is like a martyr. In this, she is not ‘a person who is killed for maintaining his or her religious belief,’ yet in her pursuit of an ideal but unattainable love, she is torturing herself. Her bathos exposes the foolishness of her beliefs. Even so, have not many of us felt as though we ‘may die’ from the pain of losing a love?”
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