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Today, I finished the first of a series of three paintings on the subject of moral development, entitled: Tabula Rasa.

THE BLANK SHEET 

Baby horses can stand right after birth, baby turtles crawl out of the egg right into the sea, but when we humans are born, we start with nothing. It's amazing really, how much of our humanity is missing at the beginning. As babies we not only lack the co-ordination needed to fend for ourselves; we have no knowledge of the world to make sense of it, to make fun of it or to reason with it (or rage against it). Least of all do we know how to reciprocate in a relationship, how to behave in polite company, how to curb our impulses for the good of others: in other words, of morality.

Ancient Stoics had a good term for this: they said that we are born 'a blank sheet' (or Tabula Rasa). We know nothing about how to be a good human being, although we carry the 'seed of goodness' in us, waiting to come to fruition. The sheet still has to be written on.

My model for the Tabula Rasa was my little cousin Jip, four weeks old. A baby so new that everything about him was still unfocused: his eyes, his movements... a human being at the very beginning of life. 

As a background I have chosen a map of (part of) the universe. This is a modern astronomical map, we are modern Stoics after all. The Stoic idea, now corroborated by science, that we are part of the universe, that our atoms are as old as the universe and will continue to exist within the universe after we die, is symbolized by the lines and numbers of the map going right through Jip's body:

He is literally part of the astronomical chart, and it is part of him.

A cross-section of an egg is part of the map; this symbolizes two things. First, exemplifies the seed of goodness, from which, with the right care, the owl of wisdom will grow. Wisdom, being the mother of all cardinal virtues, stands for morality in my painting. Secondly, the egg symbolizes the egg of the phoenix, the Stoic symbol of the universe and renewal of life.

TABULA RASA: VIEW THE PAINTING