Elegant Lush Anthology of Illustrated Love Poems by Pete and Gesso: A Collaboration of Two Artist Shared Vision Navigated by the Most Common Human Experience of Love.
Love is the most basic human emotion. As we navigate our passions, our desires, our erotic senses, we strive to decipher what it means to be human, what it means to be a man or a woman and what it means to actualize unity with another. For each and every one of us, life begins and ends alone, but in the interim come opportunities to form inexplicably intimate bonds, to literally fuse two lives into one, or as we more commonly know it, to fall deeply and meaningfully in love.
We love in so many different ways, never feeling one particular feeling at a time, but rather luxuriate in an amalgam of mixed responsiveness and paradoxes. Love has fear, power, guilt, misery, loneliness….it has pain and pleasure … it involves almost every feeling. Every human being falls in love.. We try to understand it, but loving someone is always a work in progress….we are after all mere mortals seeking someone to understand and love us. We want our dreams and our souls to be connected to another human being….One of the most difficult things we do is navigate our passions, our desires, our erotic senses in search of such unity.
The words do not exist without the images. They are not separate and in this way the unified perception of two artist is undeniable, an emotive coalescence of a literary and visual experience, an environment where the two mediums bend in an endless circumference.
The journey from alone to together is a long and circuitous one, progressing step-by-step, moment-by-moment, action-by-action and word-by-word. We are about take that journey, from passion, attraction and desire, through observation, communication, introspection and assessment... and perhaps ultimately to attainment, to the bliss of unconditional surrender to another.
Song of Desire allows the reader to embark upon a journey of love, but well reminded that love is never one feeling at a time but an amalgam of mixed emotions and paradoxes. Sparse and precise words lay down into pages of clouds and the reader can easily navigate from the abbreviated neo verse into the aesthetic effects of erotic beauty.
Together writer and poet, Gesso Cocteau and illustrator Pete Berg weave the sensuous narrative of the desire to love and be loved in all of its misery, guilt, pleasure, pain and ecstasy. Cocteau recently said of the work, “It’s abbreviated poetry activated by passionate images. Its almost hypnotic the way, one line of word falls down to the next singular word line. Then, they merge with Pete’s illustrations into a world of beauty, desire, lust, passion, confession, trust and love.
This special edition signed by the artist book comes packaged with two original prints, two greeting cards, bookmark and a personal note signed by Pete and Gesso
PETE BERG
Pete Berg has been painting and creating digital art for over thirty years. His roots are in graphic design, commercial art, interior design and antiquities.
His interest are Asian Erotic Art, studying the Old Master’s and black and white photography. When Pete was in his twenties he was a leading street artist in Holland. One of his pieces featured in Rotterdam during their Art Year of Culture. Illustrator Pete Berg creates images of a sensuous narrative seething with a desire to love and be loved in all of its misery, guilt, pleasure, pain and ecstasy. His sense of aesthetics breathes with erotic beauty.This style of the nontraditional visual verbal blend started as an experiment and has concretized into a philosophy that love is not about the end product of two people but instead the process of finding a shared truth and being open and honest with another human being. Images deciphering the poetry range from subjects of love to rage, beauty to the savage, pleasure, pain and an elevated sphere where nothing exist except the reader and his own personal transparent
story line of love. In the style of the Romantics, Song of Desire include, ‘Black Wind, Golden Fall’,
‘Eye of the Heart’ and ‘We Love Deeply’. Cocteau and Berg reside in Palm Springs, CA and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.