
Nicolás Uribe – Sunday Conversation (2008)
I really love this guy’s work.
But this one in particular has a lot of meaning for me.
My life has been a living hell for the last five months. My partner is dependent, at least, in all likelihood addicted to pain killers. She’s fine as long as she can get pills but when she can’t she becomes profoundly emotionally abusive, manipulative and suicidal.
For the longest time, she was the only person who wanted me and more than that wanted to be with me. But at the end of May last year, I went out to the Bay Area for the first time and spent 48 hours with my friend Amadine (not her real name).
It was maybe the best 48 hours of my entire life. I have only ever felt so completely connected with one other person in my life.
Anyway, the first night I was with her we ate edibles together and sat on the couch in her living room talking. As those of you in California already know, the CA medical edibles tend to come in a bit higher in THC concentration than they are advertised. For example: at that point I was consuming around 35mgs on a two days on-one day off rotation. I ate something like 65mgs that night and I’ve only been that stoned maybe three other times in my life.
Amadine was outline three projects she wants to work on, one involving animation.
Unlike this painting, we were fully clothed. In fact, her partner was in the other room. We also were not sitting side-by-side. She was sitting with her back against the arm of the couch, with her legs crossed, her knee touching my thigh.
The only light in the room was a lamp on Amadine’s desk–her desk being in a recessed work space divided off from the main room by one of those antique dividers with the carved wooden arabesques. As my eyes scanned between her eyes and the room–I have trouble with eye contact and while that trouble is almost non-existent with her, I had to keep shifting my gaze because the urge to lean forward and kiss her was so overwhelming.
The light through the carved gaps seemed like it was rotoscoped, it kept undulating and shifting slightly distracting me. Amadine stopped talking and we just sat there looking at each other for what felt like five minutes. She finally giggled and smiling broadly said, wow, yo, that was super intense.
It’s taken a while but we’ve finally gotten around to talking about our experiences of that weekend. And it turns out that we are both insanely attracted to each other but that due to a number of factors in her world right now it’s not something that those feelings aren’t something that can be acted upon just yet.
So yeah, this painting perfectly captures the feeling of sharing space and time with a dear friend that I love and am devastatingly attracted to…
It’s probably not realistic and I know we won’t hook up when I see her again next month, but I stupidly have in mind that we might be able to share space again like before, perhaps more inline with this painting. (We both have a pronounced nudist streak, so it’s not impossible even if it is unlikely.)