The Chlld I Could Not Save By Artist Samantha Gullen

30 x 24 inches

Acrylic on canvas.

This painting is about the quiet grief of self-abandonment that comes with survival. The woman walking away is not cruel, but exhausted. The child left behind is not forgotten-she is carried forward in a different form.

I painted this to honor the moment when I had become someone else in order to live. There was no rescue, no dramatc break-only distance, necessity and time. The landscape reflects that emotional terrain- muted,vast, and heavy with what cannot be said.

This picture is not about failure, but about the cost of endurance, and the complicated love between who we were and who we had become