This is one of a series of five paintings. They all have the same girl, the same back ground, the same solitary tree, only what what she has in/rests her right hand on, changes.
In the first painting she holds a blue balloon, in the second a chimpanzee, in the third she holds a flag with the Apple logo on it but with skull bones added to it, the fourth she holds an AK47, and on the fifth she is "holding hands" with a missile.
Is there a message behind these paintings?
For me, yes, it's about loss, the loss of innocence.
Although words are commonly considered the optimal tool for communication, in my view, sometimes they just are not enough.
Are there words that can communicate properly what one feels after watching school-shooting after school-shooting on the News? Especially the school-shooting at Sandyhook Elementary School.
20 innocent children and six adults lost their lives in the space of minutes.
And the survivors? Suddenly the un-thinkable became reality and the world would never again look or seem the same. The shooter did more than kill his victims, he forever removed innocence from all the children who survived.
The shooting took place six years ago but I can't help but wonder how the survivors are doing today.
Not to mention all the children who are survivors of wars, famines, dreadful diseases, loss of their families, etc.etc. Traumatic events, whatever they may be, leave scars and although the passing of time can assist in helping us to move forward and onward, for many of us, the scars never really disappear, we just learn to live with them.
Innocence, once lost, in my view, is lost forever because it is hard to unknow something once we know it.
Some say that denial is often our first line of defense when we experience something that is hard for us to grasp. We may find ourselves scrambling for rational explanations or feasible excuses for why what happened, happened. From what I can gather, this is common in for example, domestic abuse situations.
A child in a domestic abuse situation more often than not defends his/her abusive parents (nurturers) behaviour: "it's only because he/she was drunk that he/she hit me, it's only because he/she wants me to be strong that he/she is so tough on me", rather than entertaining the thought that his/her parents are "bad" and or does not love him/her.
For a child, the thought that he/she is not loved by his/her parents is unacceptable and so must be rejected, and denying how things are in favour of how one wants things to be (denial) is one way of doing so.
Denial as a coping strategy however, as a child grows and matures, rather than being helpful can easily become a stumbling block. In order for a child to be able to make sense out of something they don't understand, to be able to deal with difficult situations and events, the onuses is on us adults to try to explain those situations and events to the child in a truthful yet also compassionate way.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, is not something only adults experience, children do too.
School shootings, floods, fires, car crashes, wars, abuse and violence of many diverse kinds, etc. are events that affect us all and often alter how we experience our existence.
(I have no facts or figures to substantiate whether our world today is more violent and brutal than ever, but I think you would agree with me that we have more knowledge and information of it.
A child does not even have to leave its home in order to become traumatized by images of mankind's
violence, all it has to do is watch the news.)
We can not protect children, ours or others, from ever experiencing traumatic events, but we can make sure that we stay ever vigilant and open to listening to what they have on their mind, what they worry about, and what they are scared of. We can encourage them to share their feelings with us, and we can make sure that they know that they matter to us by spending time with them in which they have all of our attention.
As Frederick Douglass said: "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
"It is not our job to toughen up our children to face a cruel and heartless world. It is our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless." (L.R. Knost)
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