Fire and Ice
In Frost’s poem, he spoke of Fire or Ice and their devastating effects of either one. The theme love seemed to resonate throughout his poem and in my visual interpretation of his poem, I seek to show the balance that arises from the combination of both.
The image of a heart is chosen because of its common symbolic use as love.
- Fire is smoldering passion and desire from the heart. Fire consumes, warms, and illuminates but can also bring pain and destruction.
- Loving someone so much the intensity of it hurts you can be detrimental.
- Ice is a symbol of rigidity, frigidity, coldness, and the absence of love. Ice suggests distance and space but it is also synonymous with loneliness; its cutting edges and biting cold can harm.
- When one loves no more, the heart seems to be absent.
- Fire and Ice have to exist together. They balance each other out, similar to Ying and Yang.
- While one can love the other a lot, distance provides clarity of mind and might even fan the embers of one’s heart.
- In the middle photo, the heart beats in synergy with the blend of solid shapes and negative spaces reminiscent of veins amidst a warm background.
- The photos are placed so that the first depicts fire, the second the balance, and the third ice.
Composition of Images:
- The first image is over-saturated, providing an intensity of colors that seemingly radiate heat. It strains the viewers’ eyes and suggests pain and hurt. There is a graduation to the colors of the lone heart, from warm red to almost black, suggesting that the deeper the descent into the embers, the more likely the heart is to char.
- The third image shows a cutout of a heart. The background is a cool blue and the cutout is black with an obscure reflected image in it. In contrast to image one, image three suggests the absence of love and the reflection in the cutout suggests an infection of the heart.
- The middle image is the balance. It combines elements from both the first and third images and is reflective of Fire and Ice together. Both complements each other to create a more humane looking heart.