This pretty picture of a heart belongs to none other than Jim Dine, a totally cutting-edge, contemporary artist.

Believe it or not, you’re not looking at an elementary school girl’s painting. Dine and his hearts are something of a love affair, but then again, I suppose many artists have tried to tackle the idea of this complex and confusing emotion. Robert Indiana’s infamously simple and understated Love sculptures and paintings come to mind, but so do more traditional works, especially those that feature our pal Cupid.

Although we may associate the cartoony, stylized heart with Valentine’s Day and love, Dine politely disagrees. For Dine, who claims to have painted, sculpted, and printed millions of hearts over the course of his career, the simple shape of the heart in the context of an artwork can mean anything and can take any form he desires. Here an underwater scene overwhelms with fish, squids, and even a little lobster swimming freely around the canvas.

However, he wasn’t always so free with his hearts’ meaning. They initially represented his wife and the loving relationship that he shared with him. He has since departed from this specificity in favor of a larger, more universal message that also allows him to experiment with the heart’s shape and form.

Don’t let the bright colors and focus on popular objects and images fool you. Dine is most definitely not a Pop artist, and he wants you to know that. Rather, he sees himself as continuing the artistic legacies of neo-Dada artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. A more useful way to approach his work is to think of the variations on familiar images like his hearts. Curators have featured his works in exhibitions that explore the evolving nature of the still life. Although Dine’s works are quite a departure from what we traditionally think of like a still life, I always appreciate artists who do the unexpected.