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.

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

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.

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