The surroundings help to accentuate the whole wretched picture of the old mental hospitals. It was fortunate that the painter had the opportunity and the drive to paint. This patient suffered from a long-standing schizophrenic illness during which time she had occasional periods of improvement. In a series of over three hundred pictures she produced undistinguished copies from magazines when she improved, but when she was ill she changed to a typical naive paintings. These showed events in her past life and comments upon the local town and people.
Naive painting is hard to define.
It tends to be direct, it relieves tension by its simplicy, figures are poorly drawn and perspective is sometimes distorted and the pictures are flat without depth. Nevertheless they characteristically have a sense of contentment and are peacefully satisfying. La fora the Spanish psychiatrist compared the art of children and of naive painters to the art works of the mentally ill. Naive paintings often recollect incidents in the person's earlier life such as the teacher taking the class. Some pictures have an artistic appeal.