Do Not 2019

Daria Theodora made this watercolour painting with touches of coloured pencil at the turn of the 21st century. Its visual language emerges from contemporary illustration. The central image of the downcast girl, with her flowing hair, is surrounded by dream-like objects. The mood is ambiguous: do these motifs threaten or protect her? The title invites us to see the image as a warning against the dangers of a threatening world, and the artist seems to comment on the social precarity of young women within this cultural context. To truly understand the artist’s intention here, we would need to delve into the institutional history of illustration, and into the history of popular imagery of vulnerable young women. This is a task for the historian. Art's meaning is always contingent on the social conditions of its making.