Pride Painting: Ego, Influence and the Seven Deadly Sins | Julia O'Sullivan
- Julia O'Sullivan of Jupigio-Artwork
- Mar 23, 2024
- 20 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Pride Painting By Julia O'Sullivan
Introduction — What Does Pride Mean to Me?
Pride has been one of the more uncomfortable sins for me to explore because I recognise its presence everywhere — including within myself.
I am not talking about the quiet pride we feel when we have worked hard, survived something difficult or achieved something meaningful. I believe that kind of pride has value. It can give us confidence and help us rebuild ourselves when life has tried to make us feel small.
The Pride that troubles me begins when that confidence needs somebody else beneath it.
It is the ego that says I am better than you. More important. More intelligent. More desirable. More deserving of attention. It is the belief that status somehow gives one person the right to command another.
I have encountered that Pride throughout my life, and I see it increasingly within the world around me. It feels infectious — a performance of superiority that continually asks us to watch, admire, envy and participate.
And it infuriates me.
Perhaps because I understand something of it myself.
My own pride has often grown out of being put down. At times it has been armour: a way of counterbalancing criticism and refusing to allow somebody else's opinion of me to become my opinion of myself.
There is strength in that.
But there is also danger.
Sometimes the armour becomes the show-off. The ballsy, arrogant, I’ll show you part of me that wants to prove something simply because somebody once suggested I couldn't.
At my age, you would think I'd know better.
But that is precisely why creating this collection has been so revealing. I cannot paint the Seven Deadly Sins as though I am standing safely outside them, pointing at everybody else.
They exist in me too.
So while Pride became my observation of a world increasingly obsessed with ego, attention, status and elevation, it also forced me to examine where healthy self-belief ends and something less attractive begins.
For me, the boundary is becoming clearer.
Pride becomes dangerous when my need to feel taller requires somebody else to feel smaller.
That is the place from which this painting grew.
I wanted to take Pride off the page as an ancient moral concept and place it inside the world I recognise today — exaggerated, grotesque and impossible to ignore.
And in doing so, I found myself asking a question that became central to the entire painting:
If Pride needs our attention in order to survive, how much of its power are we giving it ourselves?of the painting's symbolism
Chapter One – What Is Pride?
Pride is a strange sin because not all pride is wrong.
We tell people to be proud of themselves. We feel pride in our children, our achievements, our work and the things we have overcome. Sometimes pride is what allows us to stand back up after somebody has tried to make us feel worthless.
That is not the Pride I am exploring.
The Pride within this painting begins when our sense of worth becomes dependent upon being above somebody else.
It is no longer enough to feel successful.
Someone else must see our success.
It is no longer enough to feel attractive.
Someone else must desire us.
It is no longer enough to have knowledge.
Someone else must believe we know more than they do.
And it is no longer enough to possess influence.
We need people to obey it.
That is when confidence begins its transformation into ego.
What fascinates me about Pride is how dependent it actually is upon other people. We tend to imagine the proud person as supremely self-assured, but excessive Pride constantly requires an audience.
It needs admiration.
Recognition.
Envy.
Attention.
Without those things, there is nobody against whom superiority can be measured.
Perhaps that is why Pride feels particularly relevant to me now. We live in a world where attention itself has become valuable. Being watched can create status, influence, money and power. The ability to attract a following can elevate an ordinary human being onto an extraordinary pedestal.
But the pedestal is an illusion.
The person standing upon it is still human.
That distinction became fundamental to this painting.
I wanted to explore what happens when people begin to believe in the image they have constructed around themselves. When admiration becomes expected rather than appreciated, influence becomes entitlement and the pedestal begins to feel like a rightful place from which to look down upon everyone else.
There is something else about Pride that troubles me.
It can disguise itself remarkably well.
It can present itself as confidence, success, authority, intelligence, beauty, morality or even virtue. A person does not necessarily have to announce, I am better than you.
Sometimes the message is delivered simply through the expectation that everyone else should listen.
And once we accept that elevation, Pride becomes something more than an individual failing.
It becomes a relationship between the person standing above and the people willing to keep looking up.
That is where I wanted this painting to begin.
Not with the question of whether we should ever feel proud of ourselves, but with something far more uncomfortable:
When does believing in our own worth become believing that we are worth more than somebody else?
Chapter Two – The Pedestal: The Performance of Pride
At the centre of the painting stands Pride.
I placed her high upon a pedestal because that is where Pride believes it belongs.
Above everyone else.
She is not merely confident. She has constructed an entire identity around being seen, desired and admired. Everything about her has become a performance, from the body she presents to the possessions she displays.
Yet I deliberately made that body grotesque.
Look closely and you begin to see the price she has paid to create it.
An Ozempic syringe remains embedded in her arm. A liposuction tap protrudes from her thigh. Beneath her breasts are the scars of surgery. Her body has become something to manufacture, alter and display in pursuit of an image she believes others will envy.
I wasn't trying to criticise people for changing their bodies.
What interested me was why Pride changes hers.
Nothing is being done quietly for herself.
Everything is for the audience.
Her jewellery, rings and handbags are displayed as evidence of status and taste. They are not simply things she enjoys owning; they have become part of the advertisement of herself.
Even Pandora's Box hangs around her neck as a piece of jewellery.
Throughout my Seven Deadly Sins collection, Pandora's Box represents the darker elements of human nature waiting to be released. Here, Pride has turned it into an accessory. She carries destruction against her chest without recognising—or perhaps caring about—what might eventually escape from it.
Above all of this rises her enormous crown of peacock feathers.
She is quite literally proud as a peacock.
The peacock displays itself to attract attention, and that magnificent fan of feathers became the perfect exaggeration of the world I wanted Pride to inhabit. She does not simply want to enter a room.
She wants to dominate it.
But beneath those feathers there is something deliberately missing.
Her face.
Instead, I gave Pride a mirror.
I wanted her identity to be inseparable from vanity, but the mirror also says something more disturbing. A mirror can only return what is placed before it. Pride has spent so much time constructing the person she wants the world to see that somewhere along the way the real face has disappeared.
All that remains is the image.
Then there is the phone.
This is perhaps Pride's most powerful possession because it gives her access to the people below.
Facebook and Instagram become her stage, and the language surrounding her is relentlessly demanding:
FOLLOW.
BUY.
SHOP.
She is no longer simply displaying herself.
She is selling herself.
Her appearance, possessions, lifestyle and opinions have become products, and her followers are encouraged to believe that by buying what she buys, wearing what she wears and desiring what she possesses, they might acquire a little of her elevated existence for themselves.
But there is a contradiction here that fascinates me.
Pride appears to have all the power.
She stands above everyone. She commands the screen. She has the followers, the possessions and the enormous display of feathers announcing her importance.
Yet she is completely dependent upon the people beneath her.
If they stop looking, she has nobody to impress.
If they stop following, she has nobody to influence.
If they stop buying, her value as an influencer begins to disappear.
Her pedestal therefore represents both her power and her vulnerability.
And I wanted one small gesture to reveal just how absolute her belief in herself has become.
Beneath Pride's foot is the cross.
She does not simply ignore it.
She stands upon it.
Throughout this collection, the cross carries a continuing meaning, connecting the sins and virtues from one painting to another. Here Pride treats it with disdain. She has elevated herself so completely that she no longer recognises anything above her.
She has become her own object of worship.
And perhaps that is the most dangerous point Pride can reach.
Not when someone believes they have value.
But when they begin to believe that their value is greater than everyone and everything else.
Pride may think she owns the pedestal.
But elsewhere in the painting, other figures have climbed onto pedestals of their own.
Chapter Three – The Other Pedestals
Pride does not belong to one type of person.
That was important to me when constructing this painting. I did not want the central influencer to become an easy target while everyone else escaped scrutiny. It would be far too convenient to point at social media influencers and say, there is Pride.
So behind her stand other pedestals.
Different people.
Different audiences.
Different forms of influence.
But the same desire to be elevated.
One belongs to politics.
The politician stands above the crowd surrounded by the trappings of wealth and status. His screen is connected to LinkedIn, and his demands are not BUY and SHOP, but VOTE and ELECTION.
Beside him are two mirrors.
One contains blue balloons.
The other contains red.
This continues the visual language I established elsewhere in my Seven Deadly Sins collection, including Wrath. Red and blue represent the two dominant political houses, apparently opposing one another and asking us to choose between them.
Different colours.
Different allegiances.
Different promises.
But both still need the same thing from the people standing below:
Your attention. Your belief. Your vote.
I am not interested here in telling the viewer which political side is right or wrong. For me, the Pride lies in the elevation itself: the moment someone begins to believe that holding a position of power also makes them inherently wiser, more important or more deserving of being heard than the people whose lives their decisions affect.
Elsewhere stands another figure: the climate activist.
TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest surround this pedestal.
Again, I am not attacking concern for the environment. The subject itself is not the sin.
The ego attached to it can be.
A cause can begin with genuine conviction and still become another stage upon which a person performs themselves. Attention can become intoxicating. Being seen to care can gradually become as important as the thing we claim to care about.
The message may be completely different from the influencer selling beauty or the politician seeking votes, but Pride can still whisper the same thing:
Look at me.
Then there is sport.
Here I wanted to explore another kind of pedestal: the worship of physical achievement and the body.
The sports personality has constructed his own version of perfection. Pills and a steroid syringe reveal that the image of physical supremacy is not necessarily as natural as it appears.
Women cling to him in admiration.
But look at his hands.
He holds them down.
That gesture matters.
Their admiration feeds his superiority, yet they are never his equals. He needs them beneath him because their position reinforces his own.
His platforms are X and Snapchat.
Once again the technology changes, the audience changes and the commodity changes, but the mechanism remains remarkably similar.
Attention flows upwards.
Adoration flows upwards.
Power flows upwards.
And Pride grows upon it.
There is one detail connecting all these figures that I consider particularly important.
They are naked.
I deliberately stripped them of clothing because beneath every constructed identity I wanted the rawest version of the human being to remain.
Take away the job title.
Take away the followers.
Take away the political office.
Take away the perfect body.
Take away the possessions, the causes, the trophies and the status.
What remains?
Flesh.
Human flesh.
The pedestal tells us these people are above us.
Their nakedness tells us they are not.
And yet throughout the painting people continue to look upwards.
That is where the story becomes more complicated, because Pride cannot maintain these pedestals entirely by itself.
Someone has to keep paying attention.
But not everyone who is elevated remains there.
One of the figures has already discovered how quickly admiration can turn.
The crowd has turned against him.
Hooks drag him from his pedestal and he tumbles towards the very people who once looked up at him.
The fall is brutal because Pride has further to fall than most.
And perhaps this is the great fragility behind all these carefully constructed pedestals.
The crowd that raises you can also pull you down.
For the first time, Pride is forced to experience something it would never willingly choose.
It must look at itself from below.
And inside the mirror, Humility is waiting.
Chapter Four – The Reflection of Humility
Every pedestal in Pride has a reflection.
And inside those reflections, everything changes.
The figures who stood confidently above the crowd are still naked, but their nakedness now means something entirely different. There is nothing triumphant about it.
They are curled tightly into a foetal position.
The performance has collapsed.
The pedestal has disappeared.
This is Humility.
But I did not want to portray Humility as a peaceful, gracious answer to Pride. Throughout this collection I have explored the darker possibilities within the virtues as well as the sins, and Humility is no exception.
My figures have not willingly climbed down from their pedestals.
Humility has been forced upon them.
Inside each mirror the world is dark. Screens illuminate the walls around the naked, curled figures, carrying the messages of the people who once watched them.
But the messages have changed.
Praise has become criticism.
Admiration has become rejection.
The audience has turned.
The very screens that helped create the pedestal now illuminate the humiliation of the person who stood upon it.
In the politician's reflection, I divided this fall between the same two political colours that run through my Seven Deadly Sins collection. On one side the balloons are blue. On the other they are red.
Different political houses.
The same fall.
Neither side is immune to Pride, and neither is protected from what happens when public admiration disappears. Strip away the position, the party and the authority and, in both reflections, the human being ends up naked and curled into the same foetal position.
That was important to me.
Pride likes to believe its pedestal is permanent.
It isn't.
Around these fallen figures float balloons, giving the darkness an almost ridiculous sense of celebration.
They are having their own pity party.
Among them is a balloon shaped like a cross, continuing the language of the cross that runs throughout my paintings. But here, even the symbol of virtue has been drawn into the performance.
Because I wanted to question Humility just as much as I questioned Pride.
Is someone truly humble simply because they have been brought down?
I don't think so.
There is an enormous difference between choosing to examine yourself and being forced into submission because the world has stopped applauding you.
True humility requires self-reflection.
It requires the ability to say:
Perhaps I was wrong.
Perhaps I am not as important as I thought I was.
Perhaps I need to listen.
But wounded Pride can masquerade remarkably well as Humility.
Instead of looking honestly at the reasons for its fall, it can retreat into self-pity. It can curl itself into a ball and turn the consequences of its own behaviour into another story entirely.
Poor me.
Look what they have done to me.
Look how cruel everyone is.
And suddenly the person who once demanded admiration is demanding sympathy instead.
The performance has changed.
The need for attention has not.
That is the dark side of Humility I wanted to explore.
Self-pity arising from situations we have helped create is not necessarily humility. Sometimes it is simply ego trying to survive the loss of its pedestal.
Of course, the crowd is not automatically innocent either. The negative messages glowing from those screens can become cruel. The pleasure people sometimes take in watching another person fall can become its own ugliness.
That ambiguity matters to me.
I don't want to tell the viewer that Pride is bad and Humility is good. Human behaviour is rarely that convenient.
Pride can be brought down without learning anything.
Humility can become another vehicle for the self.
And criticism can become cruelty while convincing itself that it is justified.
Perhaps genuine Humility exists somewhere beyond all of those performances.
Because there is one thing both versions still have in common.
Pride stands upon the pedestal and says:
Look at me.
Wounded Pride curls beneath the negative messages and says:
Look at what has happened to me.
Either way, the self remains at the centre.
And while these figures are consumed by their rise and fall, something much more brutal is waiting beneath the pedestals.
The wheels are already turning.
Chapter Five – The Envy Devil and the Punishment of Pride
Beneath the pedestals lies another part of the story.
The wheels.
They are not simply part of the chaos surrounding Pride. They represent the traditional punishment I chose to bring into the painting.
The punishment for Pride is to be broken upon the wheel.
Bodies are caught amongst them. Human forms appear twisted, trapped and broken as the punishment takes place beneath the very pedestals upon which Pride has elevated itself.
I wanted the punishment physically below Pride for a reason.
Pride spends its existence trying to rise.
Higher status.
More admiration.
More influence.
More power.
It continually looks upwards towards the next level of importance, while rarely considering what might be waiting underneath.
And underneath my Pride is the fall.
The wheel destroys the very thing Pride has worked so hard to construct: its elevated image of itself. It does not care how beautiful, important, powerful, influential or admired someone believed themselves to be.
Once caught within it, everyone is simply a body.
That connects with the nakedness of the figures above. Throughout the painting I keep stripping away the things human beings use to establish hierarchy until we are confronted by the same uncomfortable truth.
Beneath everything, we are flesh.
But Pride is not alone amongst the wheels.
Sitting upon one of them is the Devil.
As throughout my Seven Deadly Sins collection, I have not simply given the Devil the same identity as the sin dominating the painting. The sins feed one another, and here my Devil represents Envy.
He holds his club and licks his lips.
He is waiting.
I chose Envy deliberately because Pride and Envy have an almost parasitic relationship.
Pride wants to be envied.
It displays the body, the possessions, the success, the power and the lifestyle because simply having them is not enough. Their value increases when somebody else wants what Pride possesses.
And Envy needs Pride just as much.
It needs something above it to desire.
Something apparently more beautiful.
More successful.
More powerful.
More important.
Pride stands upon the pedestal saying:
Look what I have.
Envy looks upwards and answers:
I want it.
They feed one another.
That is why the Devil does not need to interfere with the performance above him. Pride is already creating exactly what Envy needs.
Every extravagant display.
Every perfect body.
Every possession.
Every declaration of importance.
Every carefully constructed life presented to the people below becomes another opportunity for comparison.
And comparison is fertile ground for Envy.
But there is another reason I wanted Envy sitting upon the instrument of Pride's punishment.
Envy does not necessarily remain an admirer.
Sometimes it wants to see the pedestal collapse.
The same person who watches another rise can experience a very different satisfaction when they fall.
My Devil knows this.
That is why he is licking his lips.
He can watch Pride being worshipped and enjoy the Envy it creates.
Then he can watch Pride fall and enjoy that too.
Either way, he wins.
The wheel therefore becomes more than a medieval punishment brought into a contemporary painting. It represents the brutal circularity of the world Pride creates around itself.
Rise.
Display.
Be admired.
Be envied.
Fall.
Be judged.
Be broken.
And somewhere in that cycle, another person begins climbing towards the empty pedestal.
The Devil does not need to stop them.
He simply waits for the wheel to turn again.
But while all this is happening, there is something I find even more disturbing.
Beyond the wheels, beyond the pedestals and beyond this entire spectacle, Eden is already there.
The people below could turn away.
They simply don't.
Chapter Six – The Crowd, Eden and the Illusion of Power
At the bottom of the painting is the crowd.
For me, they are every bit as important as the people standing on the pedestals.
Because Pride needs them.
They gather beneath the screens, pressing the LIKE, HEART and VOTE buttons. Their attention is fixed upon the figures above them and the constant stream of messages demanding their participation.
They watch.
They follow.
They admire.
They vote.
They buy.
And through every interaction, they feed the very thing towering over them.
I wanted them to appear almost hypnotised by the spectacle.
They are surrounded by this ugly performance of status, vanity, politics, influence and superiority, yet they continue to participate in it. Their attention has become a form of currency, and every time they give it away, somebody else's pedestal becomes a little higher.
This is where I wanted to turn the responsibility back towards us.
It is very easy to blame the influencer.
Or the politician.
Or the celebrity.
Or the sports personality.
But who is watching them?
We are.
Who follows them?
Who presses the buttons?
Who buys what they promote?
Who gives them the audience from which their influence is created?
We do.
That does not absolve those who abuse their influence, but it raises an uncomfortable question about where their power actually comes from.
A pedestal is useless if nobody stands beneath it looking upwards.
And within the crowd, I have shown what happens when that attention changes direction.
One influencer has pushed them too far.
The admiration has gone.
Hooks reach upwards and pull him from his pedestal. He falls towards the same people whose attention once helped keep him there.
I wanted that fall to be brutal because public adoration can be brutal in both directions.
We can elevate people beyond reason and then appear almost delighted when they fail to remain the impossible person we helped create.
We build the idol.
Then we tear it down.
Perhaps there is Pride in the crowd too.
While all of this is happening, something entirely different surrounds them.
Eden.
It is there at the bottom of the painting, within easy reach.
The dove is there too, representing the possibility of peace and freedom beyond the spectacle.
Nobody is physically preventing the crowd from reaching it.
There are no bars.
No locked doors.
No chains.
They simply have to look away.
And yet they don't.
Their faces remain turned towards the screens.
Their fingers continue pressing the buttons.
That is one of the saddest parts of the painting for me.
They are standing beside something beautiful while choosing to consume something artificial.
The influencers tell them what to desire.
The politicians tell them what to believe.
The personalities tell them who deserves their attention.
The screens keep calling them back.
And Eden waits.
There is an irony in that which I deliberately wanted within Pride.
The people on the pedestals appear to possess the power, but actually the people beneath them hold something extraordinary.
They can stop looking.
They can stop following.
They can stop admiring.
They can stop pressing the button.
Collectively, they can remove the very thing upon which Pride depends.
Attention.
That is why I see Pride's power as fundamentally false.
It can shout from the highest pedestal, but its voice only matters while someone is listening.
Without the audience, the influencer is simply a person holding a phone.
The politician is simply a person asking to be heard.
The sports personality is simply a human body.
Strip away our attention and the enormous structures of importance we have built around them begin to shrink.
Perhaps that is the freedom represented by Eden.
Not another person telling us what to think.
Not another pedestal.
Not another performance.
Simply the ability to turn away.
And yet Pride understands something about us remarkably well.
We find it very difficult not to look.
Chapter Seven – Living with Pride: Why We Collect Symbolic Art
Why would anyone want to live with a painting about Pride?
Perhaps because Pride is something none of us can entirely escape.
This painting is not intended to hang on a wall and simply condemn the influencer, the politician, the sports personality or the people gathered beneath them. If that were all it did, it would allow us to stand safely outside the story.
I don't think we can.
For me, living with symbolic art means discovering that the painting occasionally turns its attention back upon you.
At first you might be drawn to the spectacle: the extraordinary figures, the peacock feathers, the screens, the pedestals and the sheer absurdity of the world they inhabit.
Then perhaps you begin noticing something else.
Something uncomfortably familiar.
We all have an ego.
We all enjoy recognition to some degree. We can enjoy being complimented, appreciated or told that something we have done matters. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.
The difficulty lies in recognising when appreciation becomes necessary for our sense of worth.
That is where this painting can become personal.
I have had to ask those questions of myself while creating this collection.
Why do I want people to see my paintings?
Why does praise feel good?
Why can criticism hurt?
When am I defending something because I genuinely believe in it, and when is my ego simply refusing to be challenged?
Those are not questions I can answer once and consider finished.
My own Pride has helped me at times. It has allowed me to stand up after criticism and say, No, I believe in what I am doing. It has given me determination and the confidence to continue creating when it might have been easier to stop.
But that same Pride requires watching.
Because confidence can quietly become arrogance.
Conviction can become an unwillingness to listen.
And defending yourself can become believing that you must always be right.
Perhaps that is why I find Pride such an interesting sin to live with as a painting.
It does not simply ask us whether we recognise arrogance in somebody else.
That is easy.
It asks whether we recognise it in ourselves.
A viewer may initially identify with the crowd and condemn the people standing above them. Another may sympathise with the figure who has fallen. Someone else may recognise the seduction of admiration, status or belonging.
And those responses may change.
That is what I want from my work.
I don't want the entire painting to reveal itself in one glance. I want someone to live with it and discover another small story months or even years later.
Perhaps one day they notice the cross beneath Pride's foot.
Another day they see the darkness inside a mirror.
Later they notice Eden sitting almost unnoticed beside all that noise.
And perhaps eventually they stop looking at the figures on the pedestals altogether and begin looking at the people below them.
Because symbolic art does not necessarily give us answers.
Sometimes it simply keeps asking better questions.
And Pride asks a particularly uncomfortable one.
We spend enormous amounts of time discussing the egos of those who place themselves above us.
But perhaps we should also ask:
Why are we still looking up?
Epilogue – Who Gives Pride Its Power?
When I began Pride, I thought I was painting the people standing on the pedestals.
By the time I finished, I realised I was also painting everyone standing beneath them.
And I was painting myself.
That is what this collection continues to do to me. I begin by looking outward at a behaviour that frustrates, fascinates or angers me, and somewhere during the process I find myself turning the same question inward.
I cannot criticise ego without acknowledging my own.
My Pride has sometimes protected me. It has grown from criticism and from the need to prove that I am capable when others have made me feel otherwise. It has given me courage, determination and the stubbornness to keep going.
But I also know it has another face.
The show-off.
The know-it-all.
The part of me that occasionally wants to say, I told you so.
That is mine.
I cannot paint everyone else's Pride and conveniently leave my own outside the frame.
Perhaps the important thing is not to eradicate Pride completely. I don't think I would want to. Without some belief in ourselves, how would we ever have the courage to create, speak, challenge, achieve or stand back up when somebody knocks us down?
For me, the danger begins when that belief requires another human being to occupy a lower position.
That is when the pedestal appears.
And once we are standing upon it, maintaining our position can become more important than remembering why we climbed there in the first place.
This painting has also made me question the people below.
We complain about enormous egos while continuing to feed them.
We condemn vanity while watching it.
We ridicule influencers while following them.
We distrust those who seek power while giving them our attention.
We help create the pedestal and can be equally enthusiastic when the time comes to tear somebody from it.
There is something deeply human in that contradiction.
Perhaps this is why I placed Eden so close.
We are not imprisoned within this painting.
We can walk away.
The noise, screens, possessions, status and performances do not physically hold us there.
Yet somehow they manage to keep our attention.
And attention is Pride's lifeblood.
Take it away and something remarkable happens.
The pedestal remains, but its significance disappears.
The person standing upon it becomes simply another naked human being.
Maybe that is where genuine Humility exists too.
Not curled inside the darkness throwing a pity party because the applause has stopped.
Not announcing its virtue.
Not demanding sympathy.
Just the quiet understanding that none of us is quite as important as our ego would occasionally like us to believe.
I have spent years watching Pride and feeling infuriated by the chaos I believe it creates.
Painting it has forced me to acknowledge that I participate in that world too.
I look.
I judge.
I compare.
I sometimes show off.
I sometimes want recognition.
I am part of the crowd, and sometimes I am on the pedestal.
That is my truth within this painting.
So perhaps the final question Pride leaves is not directed towards the influencer, politician, sports personality or activist at all.
It is directed towards us.
If Pride only has power because we continue to look up at it, why do we keep building the pedestal?
Coming soon: watch Pride come to life — from the very first marks to the finished painting, revealing the creation of this complex work from start to finish.
Ego - The downfall of Pride Ego the mother of sin The deadly sin of Pride
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