This pair of oil-painted tondos, along with the studies that accompany them, depict the hands of a past lover in moments of conversation, holding, and embrace. The titles of the works invoke the biblical text Song of Solomon (also known as the Song of Songs), which speaks of love through the language of touch, eroticism, and embodiment. In the Song, desire is known sensorially—through skin, gesture, and proximity—situating the body as a site of knowledge and devotion.
These paintings underscore heartbreak as a bodily condition rather than a purely emotional one. Hands are rendered in isolation, becoming instruments of perception, care, labor, and survival, as well as vessels of memory that carry both tenderness and loss. The circular format suggests reciprocity, repetition, and return, mirroring how longing revisits the body over time. Touch becomes not only a private register of intimacy but a way of knowing the world, foregrounding the body’s capacity to remember even when contact has ceased. Echoing Audre Lorde’s call to “not let your head deny / your hands / any memory of what passes through them,” the paintings insist that the extremities of the body function as both instruments of knowledge and archives of feeling. Here, touch—historical, emotional, and embodied—remains a vital, sustaining force rather than something flighty or superficial.