Romance Hole

I didn’t name this one. It named itself.

It started with sheet music adhered to board, then buried under black and white acrylic, gesso, scraping, more gesso. The notation kept disappearing until it became less like music and more like the ghost of a system that used to tell someone what to do.

I scored into the surface. Drafting lines. Map lines. Maybe nothing. Just marks from a tool dragged across something that resisted.

The split happened when I stopped one campaign and started another. The top went pale and veiled. The bottom stayed dark and dense. A horizon showed up without asking.

Then I hit it with khaki house paint from the garage. Not artist paint. Wall paint. It landed like caulk across the divide, blunt and indifferent. It didn’t care about the music, the erasure, or the marks. It just sat there and dripped because gravity does what gravity does.

That was the move.

I had an Elvis G.I. Blues record and wanted the pose — that chest-forward, upward-looking, performative confidence. A guy playing a soldier in a movie about playing a soldier. A pose about posing. But every time I try to add a figure, I usually hate it.

So I soaked a Rolling Stones Emotional Rescue cover until the print separated from the cardboard. Thermal photographs. Bodies as heat signatures. People reduced to data. Portraits already pre-ruined.

I put a strip down the right side. Now the buried sheet music sits beside the thermal contact-sheet grid: music you can’t read, bodies you can’t recognize. Two failed notation systems.

The title came from torn song-title fragments at the top edge. Two words landed beside each other by accident: Romance. Hole.

Blunt. Slightly vulgar. Refuses to explain itself. It sounds like a place that shouldn’t exist but immediately does.