“Love Songs for Kay”

New Paintings by

Harvey Brody

EXHIBIT: Opens August 23, 2025

Thru Oct 5, 2025

New paintings by Harvey Brody.

Sometimes it’s hard for even me to correlate the pain that is at the center of the
paintings with their vivid colorations and energy in Love Songs For Kay: Coupled/
Uncoupled. But after the death of my partner/lover of 50 years, the grief was real and
was the impetus for seeking solace in my studio and spending three years after her
death to create this body of work.
The titles of the paintings helped to establish a narrative for the healing I sought. Love
Songs For Kay is an anatomy of a symbiotic relationship between two artists with
mostly opposite natures. In recalling the duality of our co-existence I see how perfectly
suited we were for each other in a Universe of duality. And I discovered how I’ve
always been painting with this construct fully absorbed into my process.
There is no overarching single mood or single emotion in any of the paintings. Each
painting becomes a complete journey into my consciousness with the rich imagery of
that process rendered in layers of acrylic paint. The imagery grows organically out of
the paint; what I like to call the “paint’s DNA”.
If one doesn’t find the exact same narrative l’ve constructed while immersed in the
paintings, I will tell you I feel just as successful because of it. That is, if you spend the
time to be engaged by the painting.
What I finally saw, complete worlds of pain and joy, of life and death, were
created through sorrow. Each viewer will bring a different life experience to the
paintings and “see” them differently —that is one of the great functions of art.
There is one universal theme (a leit motif) that runs through the paintings: flying. There
are birds and other flying life forms in almost all of the paintings. Flight is referenced in
two of the titles: one is Dirigible, the other is an Aviary. Even more critical is that flight is
implied in the positioning of myself as a poet above the mundane necessary functions
of the world that have been taken up by my paramour Kay. Dramatically those
positions are reversed with Kay ascending to morph into “constellations” and me
descending to earth to learn those ordinary household chores. One can
imagine our spirits passing each other by moonlight. The final image of the film is of
Kay in the pilot’s seat of an airplane not yet in the air.
Finally I want to close with a poem that invokes the nickname of Charlie Parker (and
short for Yardbird) and the popular graffiti Bird Lives that started after his death. People
would not let his music and his spirit die.
I’ve invoked Bird Lives because of its metaphoric relevance to flying and it’s resonance
for belief in art and the artist. That’s what I want for my paintings, that’s what I want for
Kay. That’s what I hope for everyone because the creative energy that helped me
through the most difficult time in my life is in everybody’s House. No, we’re not all
going to reach the heights of Charlie Parker. But we can still fly. If you don’t fly you can
dance. Flying is only dancing unencumbered by gravity.

Bird Lives
Outside the Box
Outside the Sphere
But in the House