The Queen of Hearts - A Study in Devotion and Ruin

This series belongs to a quiet kingdom of memory — not the kind found in storybooks, but the kind carried in the bones. The Queen, the King, their court and witnesses — each of them caught between devotion and defiance, faith and doubt, tenderness and ruin.

They are not romantic figures.
They are human ones.

In these portraits, love is not ornamental. It is worn, endured, bargained with, protected. Crowns feel heavy. Hearts feel older than the faces that hold them. Symbols return like ghosts — keys, crosses, cards, threads — marking the places where loyalty was tested, where sacrifice was asked, where something singular and unspoken was kept.

This is not a fairy tale.
It is the echo of lives lived under quiet pressure — the weight of expectation, the ache of longing, the private rebellion of the heart.

Each piece is meant to feel unearthed rather than created — as if it arrived from a deck that has already seen too many hands.

Heather Lynn Donovan
Always by Candlelight