July 2014: I'm studying Stoic philosophy at the Marcus Aurelius School, and for this term (the Ethics Term) I'm doing an art project: a series of paintings about moral development.
The first painting will be of a baby - the ancient Stoics believed we are born a Tabula Rasa (a blank slate), but with the seed of goodness within us.
So earlier this week I had a photo session
with my nephew Jip (pronounced Yip), who is four weeks old. The best painter's model you can imagine! He's a
lovely easygoing little fellow, but like all babies he moves
constantly to train his motor skills (very clever of him). So for the
purpose of this painting I took hundreds of photos to get a good idea
of what he looks like, from all sides, and started working from the
photo's.
To the right you see a few of the sketches I did today. For three of the drawings I used charcoal; the one on the bottom left is in pencil.
I would like to let the development of
the owl, simbol of wisdom, to synchonize with the development of the
humans in my paintings: from egg (symbolizing the beginning), to fledgeling, to sitting
owl, to flying owl, symbolizing perfect wisdom.
I like the word play in Dutch: owl
fledgeling (uilskuiken) means silly fool... And the ancient Stoics believed that everyone who isn't perfectly wise is a fool - luckily, they also believed that no-one could be perfectly wise, so that's a relief. I quite like the idea of being an 'uilskuiken'.
