Naïveté
24″ x 18″ oil/canvas
This painting came after a conversation with a freshman dorm mother at an Eastern college. The emotional problems of the women under her care were troubling. “They have no idea who they are and they don’t know how to identify and deal with their problems,” she related. Suicide and depression were the consequences of the lack of self-definition. Paper dolls, and Barbie Dolls, became my ideograph to describe these amorphous young women. Society’s focus on the body beautiful, made it easy for a sexually oriented message to be an important and often distracting one that outweighed longer term personal growth that inhibited the setting of goals.