Heart in Hand — Red & Black Acrylic with Gold Accent (6×6″)
A contemporary acrylic artwork on cradled panel exploring vulnerability, compassion, and street-art symbolism—merging raw emotion with minimalist urban design.
Love, Unsleeved
There’s a phrase — wear your heart on your sleeve.
It implies openness, exposure—a willingness to let the world see what bleeds beneath the surface. But what happens when the sleeve itself is gone?
Love, Unsleeved takes that idiom and peels it back to something more raw — a gold heart suspended in a blackened hand, stripped of protection, suspended over a red field that hums between violence and passion. The piece borrows the language of urban graffiti — the imperfect imprint of the human touch, the permanence of emotion layered over impermanence itself.
The heart glints because compassion still exists—but it’s fragile now, pressed into form by pressure, surrounded by scarred pigment. It’s not performative; it’s survival.
Is compassion lost?
Maybe not — but it’s certainly no longer clean. The gesture of the raised hand, half-offering, half-reaching, becomes a question:
What does it cost to hold love when the world has made it heavy?
I painted four versions of this concept—gold, silver, white, and this red field. Each gave differently. This one stayed; the gold version may still be sanded down.
Gold Heart in Hand Textured Red Painting
Acrylic on 6×6-inch cradled wood panel. Black, gold, and crimson layers — each intentionally imperfect.
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