Defiant Little Girl and Onlookers (illus. for a Mans Vanity) 1949

Haddon Hubbard Sundblom captured this scene with oil on canvas and a whole lot of feeling. The painting, with its rosy cheeks and concerned looks, feels like a memory trying to surface, all soft edges and lingering questions. I'm thinking about the making of this painting, about Sundblom wrestling with this image. I wonder if he saw himself in that defiant little girl, standing her ground amidst a sea of expectations. The texture here is like frosting, thick and sweet. It's about the weight of expectations, the surface tension of family dramas. It's as though he's inviting us to consider the layers of emotions beneath the surface, the unsaid words hanging in the air like a half-finished sentence. Painters are always in conversation, aren't they? Every brushstroke is a response to what came before, a whisper in a visual game of telephone. What Sundblom started, someone else will continue, and that’s the beauty of it all.