Original Oil Painting - “The Doll Grew Up”

Oil on canvas

24 × 24 inches

The Doll Grew Up

From an early age, women are handed little pictures of who we might become — beautiful, polished, desirable, perfectly dressed, playing the right part.

The Doll Grew Up looks at what happens when the girl inside that story becomes a woman and starts rewriting it for herself.

Set in a nostalgic cocktail-party world, the painting catches her doing something wonderfully unexpected: surrounded by the rituals of adulthood, she is absorbed in making clothes for a doll. But she isn’t retreating into childhood. She’s reclaiming the imagination she had before anyone else told her what being a woman was supposed to look like.

She can still love glamour, femininity, beauty and play. She just gets to decide what they mean now.

Maybe growing up isn’t about leaving the doll behind.

Maybe it’s realizing you were always the one designing her life.