How different this image is in mood from all the other paintings in Robert’s “Seal Upon Thine Heart” series! Most images in this series are set outdoors and feature flowers, water, birds and other natural objects in among the lovers. The figures are usually still and contemplative. Embrace is set in a seedy hotel room, as two lovers tear at one another with a mixture of fury and passion. Robert’s friend Glenn MacKinnon, who bought a study of the image, referred to it as the “vampire painting.”

Created for a series based on Elizabeth Smart’s novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat down and Wept, the image depicts no one scene from the book, but does seem to capture the disillusioned tone of the later chapters when Elizabeth finally admits to herself her lover is not the dreamy poet she had first thought, but rather a flawed and somewhat pathetic character. The lovers quarrel often and then make love. In Robert’s painting, the lovers’ bodies fuse together awkwardly in a weird dance of push-and-pull. Their combined silhouette has many jagged and pointed edges that are at odds with the box-like shapes in the room around them.

Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye once commented that any story in which a character learns a lesson from a series of mistakes is a spiritual journey. By Grand Central Station might be said to be a demonic story because the heroine doesn’t learn and grow, but continually repeats the same mistake over and over. Like Baudelaire’s great collection of poems, Les Fleur du mal, Elizabeth’s story is a celebration of mistakes in the name of love. Love is a sickness from which the heroine does not want to be cured. How different this embrace is from the embrace in Robert’s later inspirational painting, Hug, from his Illness and Healing series. In Hug, the couple display not the selfish entrapment of the figures in Embrace, but the compassion and empathy of a shared and difficult experience.