This is a third printing in an inverted colorway of a print that I created in early 2016. See here for first printing colors.
A moebius strip infinity loop of giving and receiving self love - it's the gift that never stops replenishing itself. In bell hook's 2000 book All About Love: New Visions, she says,
“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim 'You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself ' made clear sense. And I add, 'Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself '.”
This echoes in the highly quotable words of one of my other personal sheroes RuPaul, a highly visible pop culture icon of self love and acceptance: "If you can't love yourself, how the hell you gonna love someone else?"
Entirely hand-cut from rubylith, during my residency at YTB Gallery in Toronto. Printed in two vibrant layers in new colorways of metallic sparkly gold and flourescent pink on lavender paper, gold and lavender on cream colored paper, and metallic gold and lavender on lavender paper at Lavender Estero in Pittsburgh. Fresh for your self love affairs!