The Novice Painter: Monster

Monster was my medical ethics piece, based on The Monster Study. I chose to do the Monster Study because I think people are especially shocked and horrified when experiments are done on children. The experiment began in 1939, and was performed on 22 orphan children. Half of the children were given positive praise for their speech, while the other half was given negative feedback for every imperfection they spoke. The phrase shown on my piece “Don’t ever speak, unless you can do it right” was actually said to these children, some were as young as 5 years old. While many of the children did not develop a stutter, they did suffer from terrible negative psychological effects; several began to refuse to speak at all in fear of being reprimanded. These speech problems would affect them for the rest of their lives. This experiment did not become publicized until later in the 2000’s.

In my painting, I chose reds, blacks and oranges to create a grungy-like atmosphere that resembled something like hell—while the child himself was rather gray and colorless. I think most of us can agree that what these children went through was a psychological hell, and I wanted to show how this treatment sapped the color or light from their childhood. I made a makeshift gas-mask to symbolize how many of these children had to filter how they spoke in order to avoid criticism from their doctors. There are other little details I included, such as a faint silhouette of the doctor in the background.

I think overall the piece is effective in representing what it was based off of; however, there is a lot of room for improvement. If I could re-do it, I’d like to make the text brighter so it’s more easily seen. I also had the end of the top phrase trail off the canvas with the words clumped together—this detail was done on purpose to show that there was no “right” way for these children to speak, as they would be negatively reprimanded no matter what. However, I worry it just came out looking poorly rendered more so than anything.

Overall I like how it looks, and I can always go back and touch up the text!