By Axyl Fredrick
After dealing with a recent heartbreak and given the choice of a topic on love, I wanted to channel the feelings I had into a form of art. Although the speaker of the poem goes through different stages of grief and loss, they are able to rebound and conquer the challenges that the titular blades of love forced upon them.
The visual element was what made me create a graph-like framework. I wanted to invoke themes of mathematics and logic while juxtaposing it with raw emotion and terror. I drew a cardioid to represent a heart, but I did so in a meticulous manner, as if I were sketching for my 9th grade geometry class, making sure the lines connected and formed a shape. The cosine wave represents a sign of hope, accompanying the pain yet still passing through it, which is also what the triangular blade strikes. The names of each sub-poem also come from directly mathematical logic and truth tables.
In addition, I also took inspiration from abstract art as well as the idea of abstracting concepts yet still conveying their ideas, as opposed to pure abstraction. I kept things flat, monochrome, and erasable. This is a stylized version of an idea that borrows from imagery of heartbreak.
