Loveloss II — on painting the hard middle of love

My husband and I have earned our marriage. That's the only way I know how to say it.

We spent a couple of years in therapy, working through the difficult stuff, knocking the corners off each other in the way that only people who are truly close can do. It was painful. It was also, I think now, the most important thing we ever did together. We wanted to find a way to make it work, and we did, and I'm grateful every day that we didn't let go in the hard middle.

Abstracted Love came from that place.

A montage of some of the paintings in the series, Abstracted Love. Artist pictured centre.

The Series

In 2015 I made a body of work called Abstracted Love, twelve paintings for a solo show in Sydney. I was thinking about the difficult moments inside committed relationships, the ones we don't talk about much, the ones that make you wonder if you're failing at something everyone else seems to find easy. I wanted to paint those moments honestly, and I wanted to normalise them a little. Just because things get hard doesn't mean they're over. Just because a relationship is painful doesn't mean it's doomed.

David Schnarch wrote in Passionate Marriage that a committed relationship is a people-growing machine, and I believe that completely. He talks about something he calls differentiation- the idea that in order to truly come together as a couple, each person has to be willing to stand on their own two feet, to take responsibility for themselves rather than leaning on the other person to regulate their emotions or complete them. It sounds simple. It is one of the hardest things I have ever done. But it changed everything.

Those hard seasons are where we grow, if we're willing to stay in them.

I painted all kinds of couples across the series, all in some kind of embrace, all in a space of pain but not letting the other go. Two figures barely visible through layers of abstraction, just eyes and hands emerging from the paint. A man resting his hand gently on a surface through which another face looks back at him from somewhere unreachable. Two bodies entwined and reaching upward together, her face tilted toward the light. And one painting of my husband and me, his arms around me, both of us looking in slightly different directions, the abstraction falling across us like weather we were standing in together.

A portrait of the artist and her husband for Abstracted Love.

I didn't set out to paint myself into the series. It happened because these weren't imagined moments. They were remembered ones.

Loveloss II

Loveloss II, oil and silver leaf on board, 2025

She is the one that stayed with me most.

She is leaning her cheek against a surface that is raw and scraped and catching light in the way broken things sometimes do. The male figure is lost in the abstraction beside her, somewhere in his own haze of pain, not quite ready to be seen. They are holding each other up, or they are holding each other back, or both. It was always more nuanced than either of those things.

I chose a woman with albinism because, firstly I found her captivating, but I also wanted her to feel outside of ordinary time, mythological almost, so that whoever looked at her could find themselves in her without being distracted by the specific. She isn't me. She isn't anyone in particular. She is the feeling itself.

The Opening

Carsten and I at Abstracted Love opening, Friends of Leon Gallery, Sydney 2016

The Sydney opening was a phenomenal night. People were genuinely interested in the work, paintings sold, wine flowed, and there was that particular electricity in a room when something has landed the way you hoped it would. I am someone who doesn't love being in the limelight. I think a lot of artists will recognise that particular discomfort of standing in a room full of your most private work while strangers look at it. But even I couldn't deny that something real was happening that night.

The show eventually sold out. The gallery owner bought one himself, which is the kind of validation that means something different from a sale to a stranger.

My husband was there. The man I had painted in the series, the man I had made these paintings alongside and because of, standing in the room where they hung. I don't have the words for what that felt like.

Where We Are Now

We are stronger than ever. That's not something I say lightly or as a comfortable ending to a difficult story- it's simply true. We have a shared vision of the future and a deep gratitude that we got through the hard times rather than away from them. We are more solid, more settled, more trusting of each other than I knew two people could be.

The paintings still exist in the world, in private collections, in people's homes. I like to think they're doing what I hoped they would; sitting on someone's wall during a hard season, quietly saying: you are not alone in this, and this is not the end.

Meredith x

Loveloss II is available as a digital download from my shop, sized for home printing up to A3. If you've ever been in the hard middle of something worth fighting for, she might belong on your wall.

And if you'd like to follow what comes next, you can join my newsletter here. I write honestly, and not too often.

Becoming Her — on painting my daughter, losing and finding myself again

I have been away for nearly two years.

Nursing school took everything I had, which was the right trade to make, but it meant the studio went quiet in a way that felt increasingly permanent the longer it went on. I told myself I would come back when things settled. You probably know how that story goes.

Things don't settle. You just eventually decide to stop waiting for them to.

The first painting I finished on the other side of all that was this one. A portrait of my youngest daughter, at eleven years old, painted life-size. I called it Becoming Her.

The painting

The process flowed in a way that felt like a gift after such a long absence. There was the usual resistance, that quiet internal friction that is just a normal and unremarkable part of making anything, nothing dramatic, nothing that stopped me. I've learned not to mistake resistance for a sign that something is wrong. It's just weather. You paint through it.

She stands in the centre of the canvas with a Labubu and Skull Pandas swinging from her bag, and a therian mask she made herself in her hand. She looks off into the middle distance with that particular composure that eleven year olds sometimes have, somehow both completely certain of themselves and utterly unguarded at the same time. I wanted to capture that specific threshold she's standing on, the last stretch of childhood before the world starts asking her to explain herself.

If you look closely at the background, you'll find her own drawings transferred faithfully in pencil, woven into all that gestural colour and movement. Her imagination is literally the world surrounding her. I wanted the painting to be full of her, not just her likeness but her actual creative life, the things she makes and collects and becomes through. An observant eye will find them. Some people will miss them entirely. I like that.

Her figure is painted with everything I have. Every hour of looking, every year of practice. And then I let the background stay loose, gestural, almost chaotic, because that felt like the truth of this moment in her life and in mine.

The abstraction isn't decorative. It speaks to something I think about a lot in my work, the way we are always in the process of creating and recreating ourselves, never quite finished, never fully resolved. And underneath that, something I find endlessly moving, the idea that we are connected to something much larger than our own edges. All that unresolved colour and movement around her isn't chaos. It's everything she is part of, and doesn't know yet.

And she loves the painting, which matters more to me than I expected.

The rejection

I submitted Becoming Her to the Adam Portraiture Award. It wasn't accepted.

I want to be honest about how that landed, because I think artists are expected to absorb these things gracefully and move on, and I did eventually, but not immediately. The Adam is the award I want to win one day. Not for vanity, or not only for vanity, but because it would mean something real about the work. It would legitimise twenty five years of painting in a way that feels important to me, in a country where I sometimes feel my work is better known internationally than it is at home.

So yes. That one kicked me.

I sat with it for a little while. And then I posted the painting anyway, quietly, without much preamble, because it deserved to be seen regardless of what a panel of judges decided. The response reminded me of something I keep having to relearn: the relationship between my work and the people who receive it doesn't run through a selection committee. It never did.

Coming back

Two years of nursing has given me more to say as a painter, not less. I look at people differently now. I see what people carry, what they hide, what flickers across a face in an unguarded moment. I think that's going to show up in the work in ways I'm only beginning to understand.

I still have paintings to create. I'm not done, not even close.

Until next time,

Meredith x

And if you want to follow what comes next, you can join my mailing list here. I write honestly, and not too often.

Becoming Her is available in two ways. The original oil painting, life-size, is available directly from me here for $7,800 NZD including shipping within NZ— if you'd like to know more, just get in touch and we can talk. For those who'd like to live with this painting in a different way, a high resolution digital download sized for printing up to A3 is available in my shop for $25 NZD. Two very different price points, the same image, the same intention behind every brushstroke.

Manawatu Art Trail weekend vibes

Thanks to all who came out for the opening and called into the gallery over the weekend. It was rewarding to hear the voices of surprise as they came through the door. Being tucked away down a rather unimpressive alleyway can cause such an experience of juxtaposed aesthetics that some people gasp out loud! Here’s a peek around the gallery.

How to Change Your Mood

The act of state change happens without us even noticing most of the time. When we feel some flavour of ‘bad’ we can reach for food to comfort, alcohol to relieve, Netflix to distract. Or sometimes it’s a healthier choice, although these tend to be actions made consciously. Regular exercise is now known to be equal or more effective than antidepressants for mild to moderate depression. Being in nature can calm and soothe after a long difficult week. Just looking at something beautiful can bring a profound state change to the viewer.

Art as State Changer

I have a keen interest in psychology and weave threads of my interest through my paintings. I’m excited to share my latest body of work with you because it aims to make your world-weary heart just that much more peaceful. Each painting has been crafted to induce the qualities of a good life. From Liberty to Serenity, close up met-gaze women openly share their inner worlds with you, and landscape escapes all painted for the sole purpose of bringing about a positive state change for you. Some won’t resonate with you, that’s ok, they’re for someone else. But my hope is that some you will want to linger on, swim in, dwell in, and perhaps find a moment of recovery.

Haven’s Legacy

New Paintings by Meredith Marsone

Opens October 13th 5 - 7pm

All welcome

Available to view at the gallery

October 14th -15th 9am - 5pm

VIP Early Access

Online early access catalogue

will be sent to my VIPs (subscribers) 10am October 13th.

This is your exclusive opportunity to purchase before the doors have even opened. If you are not already a subscriber sign up here.

I have found my true purpose in art. The past 25 years of painting have all been in preparation for these paintings and all the paintings yet to come. I hope you can feel my intentions and will join me for this wonderful unfolding.

Meredith Marsone Gallery & Studio

30 Main Street (down alleyway beside The Professionals)

Foxton, New Zealand

If you have any questions or feedback please feel free to email me.

The Magic of Resistance

I’ve made no secret of the tough year I’ve had. But one aspect I haven’t spoken much about is resistance. Resistance is all the stuff that gets in the way of doing the thing, whatever that thing may be, that brings you whichever flavour of satisfaction you most desire. For me, I was wrestling with the content of my paintings. I was spending far too much time worrying about the ‘NZ Art World’ and how I might fit in, and not enough time on what it is I really love to paint. The resistance came in many forms; procrastination, dabbling in various forms of painting content, even veering off into part time work. The breakthrough happened when I finally put down the concerns that my work wasn’t political enough and dived headlong into the feminine, romantic and unapologetically beautiful. This is the place and the people I love to paint. I’ve been waking up excited to get into the studio again. And I go to bed feeling like I gave those paintings my all. This is the best I can do today. And I’m happy with that because I know I’ll be even better tomorrow. Resistance beaten, satisfaction gained.

Thanks for hanging in there with me. I appreciate all of you so much.

Meredith x

This new body of work will open at my gallery in Foxton as part of the Manawatu Art Trail in October. For more info click here.

Yesterday I quit...

Yesterday I quit my part time job. It had been 12 years since I had been employed by someone other than myself. Here are four things I learned in the two months I worked for someone else.

1. I’m someone who values ‘high meaning’ in my work. That means I really struggle to complete repetitive tasks and stay mentally well unless I have the big picture. But as a minimum wage casual worker that was above my pay grade. I found myself in Struggle Town very quickly.

2. I like to feel useful and used to my capabilities. And then even a little bit further so I feel like I’m growing.

3. I can be really good at many things. Menial things, important things, humdrum things or groundbreaking things. Choose carefully the things you put your attention on. What you practice you get good at.

4. Self employment is terrifying and destabilising at times but working for someone else uses up my energy and my time. Two things that amount to the most important things we have.

And so I’m now ‘unemployed’ again but very busy painting, back doing what I love to do.

Lessons learned.

Mind refocussed and grateful.

Paintbrush in hand.

Work in progress July 2023

Question of the week: When do you know you're failing?

There’s a saying in startup culture: fail fast. It essentially means, learn to spot a dead horse early and quit flogging it. But when it comes to the arts it’s a long term game and ‘fail fast’ just doesn’t quite seem to apply. The creative industries are some of the first to feel the impacts of a recession and some of the last to recover. We’ve been relegated to the ‘luxury’ category so out we go with the longed for purchase of the new car and the holiday home. The financial pressure of being a full time artist is ever present but when the burden becomes too much for the work to bear, that’s when the artist and the art really begin to suffer. And that has been the last few months for me. We’re not meant to talk about the hards parts, the parts that feel like failure. When the work comes back from the gallery unsold, when no one walks through the door, or when your own internal dialogue condemns you as a failure.

Elizabeth Gilbert advises in her book ‘Big Magic’ to resist making your art pay its way. Keep hold of the job and work in the spaces in between for as long as you can. My furious artistic will has railed against this all my life. “No!”, It shouts. “It simply won’t do that I can’t paint and be celebrated AND pay the bills.” Well, at the ripe old age of 45 I have conceded that Elizabeth is right. In times like these my art can not pay its way. And I am now working a part time job at a hydroponics strawberry growing outfit to ease the pressures.

Two important things happened:

1. I was made aware that I am unemployable beyond minimum wage because my 25 years of honing a skill in painting doesn’t translate to employment which has made me reassess my career option. This is a whole other blogpost!

2. The joy came back to painting. Every minute I spend in the studio now is a celebration and the freedom I feel to express myself however I wish has injected a new vibrancy into the work. And that feels like unexpected joy, an absolute gift.

So, have I failed? In some ways, maybe. But having joy return to my work feels like a massive win.

Until next time, take care,

Ngā mihi,

Meredith x

Guest Writer: Reflections by Carsten Grimm

What does it mean to engage with your history?

I’ve been doing the long drawn out middle aged work of examining the patterns of my twenties and thirties, a potentially toe-curling experience of cringe when viewed through the grounding reality of day-to-day adulthood. Of revisiting things long wished away; regrets and lessons, but successes not fully claimed as well. There’s a lot to mine for wealth if you want to, if you can accept facing up to both shame and accomplishment without getting swamped by either.

There’s further back work to be done here too, often without an easily identifiable social container to guide you. Here in New Zealand this kind of exploration often comes about through learning your mihi pepeha; where you come from, your genealogy, your whakapapa and connections to ancestors and legacies.

I remember standing to give my first pepeha at reo class one Wednesday evening and being overcome with a crashing silence about what I could say. How is it that I got into my 40s and can barely string together the names of my grandparents, to say nothing of which corners of the globe my family once inhabited. The severing of connection to history and lineage can run deep in neoliberal western culture where it’s often all about personal choices in this one lifetime.

The Measure of My Blood is a new collection of art, still in the process of creation, by my wife Meredith Marsone, inspired by years of rubbing away at this and other questions about identity: We are all the intertwined products of woven ethnicities and histories. Today I can tell you that the Norse-Scandinavian thread of my Viking forebears met and mixed with the river of my ancestry from the Saxons and the Scotts. In this generation it has woven with Māori and other Anglo-Saxon threads. In the mix of all that vibrance, which aspects do I get to call home?

Many of us at some point come to wrestle with questions about what our histories mean for our choices today. What we get to keep, what gets backgrounded, and what gets passed on. For me this is an ongoing narrative that ignites the past where once it was dark and distant. Parts of me that were rejected get justice and a worthy place in my story.

The Measure of My Blood is an invitation for others to consider what is in their history, and what that all means for their legacy.

cjG

#mygroundtruth

For more of Carsten’s writing visit www.mygroundtruth.com

Question of the week: How do YOU look at a painting?

I’d known about Justin Paton’s award winning book ‘How to Look at a Painting’ since it was first published in 2005 but I’d always resisted the idea of ‘being told’ so had not read it until recently. Instead of being condescending or instructional, I found his writing soothing, a lullaby to my restless painterly mind. He has somehow balmed my thrashing artistic resistance by gently cooing words of encouragement, not only to me but to also any potential viewer of my work. More than anything an artist wants people to look at their work and feel as if somehow they have had something, anything, stirred within them. By looking at their painting you have seen the artist. It’s a grand but quiet gesture of acceptance and, dare I say, at times even an act of love. Paton’s book kindly and generously shows us how even the most exclusive art is inviting you to participate in its existence.

“Are fans of painting elitist? Sure we are, but no more than the sports fans who have a top night every time the All Blacks win. And with art, as with sport, the elite is wide open and self-selected. If you like to look at paintings, you’re in.”

Justin Paton, How To Look At a Painting (pg. 47)

Because, without you, what is the purpose of art? One could argue the catharsis of the artist is of some importance but with the addition of the viewer to the conversation there’s a wonderful closing of the loop. Paradoxically, it’s only the beginning of the life of the painting which will change over time depending on cultural shifts and context. Truly a life of its own! But with one constant- the need for you, the viewer.

Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts.