what does Love look like

The Footless Man generally looks on my creative side with something between awe and tolerance. He doesn't understand what drives me but he likes what I do, mostly.  He can appreciate the skill and persistence that it takes to produce a finished piece of work, be it a sock, a meal, a garment or one of my tiny canvas cards.

I have been working diligently to re image my deck of healing stories.  When I first drew them, my skills were limited so the pictures were rough.  They lacked depth, color and detail. ( Even so they could pack quite the emotional wallop.) Over the years I have improved my drawing ability.  I learned to work with color and paint.  As my technical abilities improved so did the depth and texture of the pictures

Here is the original.

Here is the repaint.  It has the same humor, but the style is much more fluid and it has a lot of texture and shading.
Most of the time the footless man looks at the paintings and say's politely, "that's nice." I don't think his eyes can take in some of the detail.
Then last Tuesday I repainted one that I guess that I didn't scan (it is called The Sage)
I re imaged it as The wounded Healer

I felt very good about the details, and the accuracy of the prosthesis.  I was pretty surprised that Footless Man didn't like having the painting in the deck.  It hit him somewhere that he still hurts.  So I had a problem.  The image is good, he feels exposed.
So what should I do?  I could ignore him and take his protest as a compliment, I could hear him out and do as he asked, and neither one felt right.
I repainted the card.

Same Idea, just a slight variation.
Maybe even more clear.
The purl side of knitting makes a grand texture that looks like bark when you dip it in paint and smoosh it on the paper.  You can see it on the tree.
I gave the original card to The Footless Man after I scanned it in.  It won't be appearing in my deck.
He would have been hurt too much if I ignored him.
Love.