Not everyone loves a Hallmark holiday, and for you we offer "My Beating Heart" cards from Artist R.L. Gibson. These 8"x10" pieces are hand-painted on 140 lb. coldpress watercolor stock and are painted as they are ordered. Available framed ($90) or unframed ($65).
'My beating heart' was a stock expression for 18th century novelists and poets. It is first recorded in Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane, a tragedy, 1702: "My beating Heart Bounds with exulting motion."
The earliest citation of the full 'be still, my beating heart' comes from William Mountfort's Zelmane, 1705: "Ha! hold my Brain; be still my beating Heart."
The expression, and the comic manner in which it is now delivered, were brought to a wide public in Gilbert and Sullivan's opera HMS Pinafore, 1878: "Oh, my heart, my beating heart!"
R.L. (Rachel) GIBSON works as a mixed media artist with work in galleries from New York to Los Angeles and collections around the world. A happily-married, mother of one, Gibson lives & works in Marion, Virginia in the southeast United States. Her practice currently explores work that overlays watercolor with embroidery. The hand-stitched component of this work lends movement to otherwise still media while paying homage to the band of quilting women she calls family.