"Young Life"

1. Claim: The family in the painting cut down the entire forest to kill the single deer.
   Facts: The man is holding a gun, there is a single dead deer on the roof of the truck, and there are no trees, only stumps.
2. Claim: The son has a deep desire to be like his father.
   Facts: He is holding a stick to imitate his father's gun, and he is standing apart from them to show that he is  independent.
3. Claim: This is a family of 1960s America.
   Facts: The truck is an American built model circa the 1950s, and they are dressed in a fashion that is characteristically 1960s.

In Bo Bartlett's "Young Life", Bartlett chose to place the subject's in a barren scene littered with tree stumps to imply that the subjects cut down the entire forest to kill a single deer. The fact that they have a deer on top of their truck and a gun shows that the people have been hunting. They are in a treeless area which is a very bad place to find deer. Deer live in places populated with trees such as a forest, so the tree stumps imply that there was once a forest here. I think the farcical nature of this scene has a deeper meaning possibly about the wasteful tendencies of 1950s and 1960s Americans.