Novels, movies, and advertising fed us the concept of a success-filled life long before the internet infiltrated our brains. Idealizing the perfect lover, spouse, child, home, car, or job, they sow discontent within the bosom of their audience. They intimate that being the ideal and possessing these idealized relationships and objects will bring a sense of fulfillment within which reside contentment and happiness. They inundate us with images of smiling, happy, beautiful, people. They imply that we are not good enough and that we need whatever they're selling to make us worthy of such a successful life.

My painting Vanitas speaks to the impact of such messaging on young woman. It represents a girl's effort to comply with an idealized image of beauty proliferated through social media. She has become a caricature of herself, mimicking what she sees despite the efforts of her family to protect her. She is surrounded by a tangle of emoji-filled ornamentation and the exclamation OMG, representing the elevation of secular beauty to sacred. Below her window the Latin inscription “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” serves as a reminder of the futility of following trends.

To read more about this work, please visit her on my website HERE and in my Journal entry HERE.