The King of Hearts is colloquially known as the suicide king. This is because of bad print making centuries ago that caused the sword tip or axe head to wear off of the edge of the block and stop printing to the cards, which made the image appear as if the King of Hearts was stabbing himself in the head.

My closest friend, Kyle, died via overdose on Good Friday of 2021.

This painting is a monument to a part of me that is gone forever. His death represents a pivotal moment in my development. The training wheels of personality are off, it seems, and it's just me representing team "us" in the harsh Olympics of real life. The 2nd anniversary of his death brings back painful memories, of course, and that's always going to be a great source of creative energy for me.

I rely strongly on synchronicity to move an idea along, it's a big part of my creative process. Synchronicity is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist, Carl Jung. It's defined by Oxford Languages as "the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection." Here's an example, Kyle and me once tried our hand at podcasting. We each researched a topic and presented our narrative to the other. Kyle's topic was the 18th century French medical oddity, Terrare. In the middle of his narrative, Kyle mentioned a bit of information not related to Terrare whatsoever, that Charlemagne was the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. In the 16th century, French card makers standardized the current suits of spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. Prior to this, there were several other ways the cards were divided - like acorns, leaves, hearts and bells or swords, wands, cups and coins. After having already chosen my Kyle of Hearts theme, I learned that these same card makers also officially associated the kings of their deck with 4 kings of antiquity. King David was associated with the King of Spades, Julius Caesar was diamonds, Alexander the Great for clubs, and, of course, the King of Hearts was associated with Charlemagne. Just short of driving myself insane with this sort of shit, synchronicity acts as a sort of engine oil for my creative process. I started reading on Charlemagne and this opened the project up for a ton of new visual ideas; like using the two swords purported to be Charlemagne's famous weapon called "Joyeuse" for the two swords sticking out of my friend on either end of the card. Also, using the "iron crown" given Charlemagne upon conquering the Normans atop the first K and the crown used to coronate French monarchs from Charlemagne's time to the French Revolution atop the K on the other end. Fun fact, that first crown, the iron one, was said to have been hammered out of a nail used for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Which brings us back around to the whole Good Friday thing. I hope you can sort of start to see how this aspect of my creative process works, how one decision leads to the next while I search out successive links in the chain. Sometimes it comes from reading about the history of empires, or from learning about the way others have approached particular themes in the history of art, or walking back the relevant painful and joyous experiences of my life within mind's eye.

- Cherry-Apple Peach 6/7/23