The Gravity of You

I was trying to paint what it feels like when someone changes the rules of reality around you.

Not heartbreak. Not even cruelty, exactly.

Disorientation.

To be loved by a narcissist is to live for a while inside somebody else’s version of the world. Things move. Events rearrange themselves. What you remember becomes questionable. Cause and consequence change places. Eventually, you spend so long trying to work out which way is up that you forget you were ever standing on solid ground.

I began with one falling woman.

Then there were three.

That changed the painting for me.

One woman falling is a story about a woman falling. Three suggested something larger: a gravitational system. Each body caught separately inside the same altered space, suspended at a different point in its pull.

The strange thing is that the centre became the quietest part.

Around them, everything churns — blue, black, gold, layers dragged over layers. But the women fall through something pale and almost empty.

I think that's closer to the experience than if I'd made it violent.

The destruction isn't always loud.

Sometimes another person simply becomes the centre of gravity, and you don't notice how much your world has tilted until you're already falling.