Si Judicas, Cognosce, [If You Judge, Understand].

About the Work:

I have spent the last ten years trying to understand who I am, I have studied and read Descartes, John Locke, Michel Foucault, Henri Bergson, I even ventured into Plato’s Republic (with great difficulty); I have read mathematicians like Roger Penrose, scientists like Richard Feynman and psychologists like Oliver Sacks, add to this the innumerable snippets and thoughts gleaned from virtual resources you would think I should have the job cracked but no, I still can’t put into words who I am. I have a much deeper understanding of the factors and influences that shape me, this part of me that I cannot show the world has taken on a for want of better words a “spiritual dimension”.

In so far as morality is more than the sum total of mores, of customs and behaviour solidified through tradition and valid on the ground of agreements, both of which change with time, it has, at least politically, no more support itself than the good will to counter the enormous risks of action by the readiness to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them. (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, University of Chicago Press, page 245 [par. 2]).

Whilst based on religious themes, this is not a religious painting, but I seek to have within it through the colour and dynamics of the marks a spiritual value that touches upon that inner self, what I feel, but through perhaps one of the best know narratives in Western thinking explore the mechanisms through which we all locate the ‘wee man’ inside us we call ourselves. In the image I use half the ‘Scales of Justice’ weighted to suggest a judgment against, in the scale are the three nails signifying consequence.

Although I am seeking to express an inner voice that words fail to convey the work also explores how we as individuals or communities and nations live (or don’t live) together and how we use these mechanisms to interact and how we resolve different beliefs within the system of customs and traditions that have evolved.