The Space Between Two People
My partner Sasha and I had to work very hard to have what we have now. When he and I started dating, I was in the process of moving to another country, though he was solidly in America. I was his first relationship and sexual experience, but after my divorce I learned that I am solidly polyamorous. He has a genderful expression, while mine is genderless. I didn’t quite understand gender, especially outside of a binary, while he identifies as masculine AND non-binary.
It wasn’t until very recently, thanks to the little stability at home we were able to build, that we had the means to do this art together. We’ve been official for just over two years, spanning three residencies. For the entirety of that time, we wanted to do something collaborative, something that captures how we feel with each other, in those moments where our spirits combine, igniting into something beyond our separate physical bodies.
To know our story is to know why this art couldn’t have happened with anyone else in my life. With that I welcome you, my friends, to the beginning of the Transference series.
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The 3 Traits of Any Relationship
In my continued journey to oversimplify things, I question how far I can reduce relationship dynamics. For me, a relationship will always have three components: Spirituality (what’s beyond you), Sexuality (what’s hot), and Society (what’s acceptable).
SP, SE, SO. These traits have different alignments for all of my past relationships, especially sexual ones. For today’s writing, I’ll only recall how my dynamics with Sasha have related to past relationships.
Here are some quick and dirty summaries:
Marriage to ex-wife, 2012-2016:
SP: Connecting with the potential to produce progeny
SE: Sexual incompatibility discovered after marriage (fuck you, Purity Movement)
SO: Interracial, married within a Church, emphasis on multicultural traditions
Poly relationship in Switzerland, 2016-2018:
SP: Secular humanism, visionary expressions, and or apathy. Explicitly spiritual relationships limited to myself (especially concerning radical trust)
SE: 2 cis-gay partners, bridging tastes and communication differences, engaging in alternative
SO: Can’t be visibly poly in public, three different cultural contexts, was approaching citizenship via marriage into a culture I didn’t like
Sasha and I, 2017-Present:
SP: A wild and wonderful experience I’m still figuring out
SE: Partner has visibly trans-masc genitalia, NB energy, genderful and gender fluid expression. Sexual attraction despite my fears relating to my marriage, sensations that go beyond our bodies
SO: Visible queerness is unsafe, transness is unsafe, but I get profiled more than he does
But Why Sasha
I mentioned earlier how this series could have only been done with Sasha. What new readers may not know is that I have done art about all my previous relationships. Most recently, and to great emotional cost, I completed the I AM ANIMA series to document the time between my divorce and what Sasha and I have now. I was always creating art, but it was never collaborative to this level. I don’t think that’s by mistake. I was scared of mistakes, of being artistically incompatible with someone who took me further than anyone else.
My marriage—“practice marriage”, as a dear friend calls it—was too immature. I knew what I stood for, but didn’t know my faith as well as I do now. I didn’t have the chance to do more than a few sketches about the beauty I saw in my ex-wife. I met her in her Art Therapy minor, but soon afterwards she gave up on her art goals during her overclocked schedule in pursuit of a psychology degree. In the majority of our marriage we lacked sexual chemistry.
My poly relationship in Switzerland had an abundance of sexual chemistry. I got to participate in sexual acts and a social dynamic that required so much trust from all parties that it forced me to get over my self-esteem issues and insecurities. The lack of spiritual significance from my partners was bolstered by this new level of trust I had to embody prayerfully in myself. Later, as the pivot between three people, I had to navigate being in demand and constantly away from at least one person I felt deeply bound to.
This leads us to Sasha. I didn’t know if I’d be able to legitimize transness and non-binary being, but on multiple levels it made obvious sense to me after being close to Sasha. It became clear that the bravery he espoused in his art and personal life was something I wasn’t used to. None of my previous partners conceptualized transness or reckoned with their own gender on so deep a level, nor shared themselves so bravely with the world. In time, it was made obvious that focusing on a relationship with Sasha was the healthiest thing I could do with my limited time on this earth.
Before we were dating, the foundation of our relationship was built during shared road trips between art conventions. I trusted him with many questions about transness that I never thought I’d ask out loud. As someone open and vulnerable to the public by default, my saying “I tell him everything” means little. I can, however, say that I experience new depths of my relationship to nature, self, and society because of Sasha’s influence. He worries about not being strong-enough, but he’s always been one of the bravest and strongest people I know.
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Collaborative Technique
If you’re curious about the process that brought us to this completed image, Sasha has illustrated and detailed breakdowns on his Patreon. Please support his exclusive updates over there. If that’s not tenable for you, here’s a summary:
Sasha and I started by doing some gestures in our sketchbooks, building off of each other’s little ideas. I took the gesture and redrew it on a larger surface Sasha had prepared. We took references of each other to inject into the energy of the gesture. Once the drawing was complete, we both took turns working on a digital comp. After I completed something I was confident in, Sasha printed the comp. Displaying it next to his easel, his experience with oil painting and a lacquer application brought the art to completion.
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Overlapping
Bravery, integrity, and sharing of the self means these paintings must look and feel in certain ways. The figures in the image, my black hare and his Steller’s Jay, overlap above the waist into one figure. They are sharing an experience that is both physical and supernatural, a rich inner and outer world. The lines between spiritual and sexual energy are blurred. The spiritual expressions are neither my inflated upbringing nor Sasha’s humble agnosticism of our pasts. Sharing vulvas and penises, glowing inside and expressing outside, swaying between a lack of gender and abundance of it, it feels something like this.
We hope you will enjoy the future images that await you in this series, and are grateful for a world that brought this to being and the means to share it with you. Please follow my Patreon and Sasha’s as well for free (yes, actually for free) for monthly updates with quality heart-poured content. If you can afford to donate money, that’s also sorely needed and appreciated too.
Love,
-J