The Seven Year Itch

Seven Paintings. Seven Years. One Marriage.

LOVE DOES NOT STAND STILL.

We fall in love.

We make promises.

We imagine forever.

But what happens after that?

What happens when the honeymoon ends, children arrive, responsibilities grow and the person standing beside us becomes part of the everyday?

And what happens when two people who once chose each other begin, almost without noticing, to drift apart?

The Seven Year Itch is a collection of seven original paintings following one couple through the first seven years of their marriage.

But this isn't simply a story about marriage.

It is an exploration of what happens to love when life gets in the way.

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Behind the Collection

We talk endlessly about falling in love.

Songs are written about it. Films end with it. Fairy tales give us the wedding and send everyone off to live happily ever after.

But that is usually where the interesting bit begins.

Because love has to survive ordinary life.

Work.

Money.

Children.

Responsibility.

Exhaustion.

Familiarity.

Disappointment.

Temptation.

And the gradual changes that happen within two people as the years pass.

I wanted to explore that quieter story.

Not the dramatic beginning of love, but what comes afterwards.

The title, The Seven Year Itch, comes from the familiar idea that around seven years into a relationship something begins to shift — that stability can become familiarity, familiarity can become complacency, and people may begin questioning the life they have built.

But I wasn't interested in simply painting a story about infidelity.

I wanted to look at something much more complicated.

How do two people go from being unable to imagine life without each other to barely noticing the distance growing between them?

And, perhaps more importantly:

Can they find their way back?

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The Seasons of a Marriage

Nature became the language through which I told their story.

The relationship begins in spring.

Everything is new.

There is optimism, possibility and the sense that life is opening in front of them.

Spring moves into summer.

Love grows into family, responsibility and abundance. Their lives become fuller, but with that fullness come new demands.

Then autumn begins to creep in.

Things change.

What once seemed permanent starts to feel less certain. Emotional distance appears and the landscape changes with them.

Eventually, winter arrives.

The relationship has reached its coldest point.

But winter is not necessarily death.

Sometimes it is simply dormancy.

And that distinction became incredibly important to the final painting.

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The Seven Year Itch

The seventh painting does not give you an answer.

I didn't want it to.

By then, the landscape has frozen.

The warmth and abundance of the earlier paintings have disappeared and the couple have reached their crossroads.

Do they walk away?

Do they stay?

Can something that has become cold ever grow again?

Within that frozen landscape is one tiny bud.

It would have been very easy to end the story with everything dead.

But relationships are rarely that simple.

The bud represents possibility.

Not certainty.

Not a convenient happily ever after.

Just the possibility that something remains alive beneath the surface.

Whether it grows is another question entirely.

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What Is The Seven Year Itch Really About?

It is about love, but it is also about time.

About how easily we can stop seeing something simply because it is always there.

About the difference between loving somebody and continuing to choose them.

And about the uncomfortable truth that relationships cannot remain permanently in spring.

They change because we change.

Perhaps lasting love isn't about preventing winter from arriving.

Perhaps it is about deciding what we do when it does.