Title: Leave Me Be
Year: 2022
Medium: Oil Paint
Size: 16 x 20

For this piece, I wanted to look into how young black girls tend to be seen as more mature compared to their white peers. This topic can be traced back to slavery in how black women and girls were portrayed as being wild and sexual in nature while white women were to be more reserved and pure. This portrayal also contributed to the many rapes of girls. Slave owners would justify these rapes by objectifying the girls rather than acknowledging their own selfish desires. My painting is a portrayal of how this history affects black girls today. To show this, I used the imagery of a young black girl sitting with a somber expression while reluctantly putting on lipstick. There is also a hand reaching to take out her hair accessory. There are also toys on the table that aren’t being played with. This tells a story of a girl that is being made to grow up
fast instead of being a child. For the oil painting aspect, I tried to experiment with layering and adding linseed oil to try out different paint consistencies.