Lust Painting: Desire, Power and the Seven Deadly Sins | Julia O'Sullivan
Updated: Sep 1
Lust Painting by Julia O'Sullivan
Introduction – What Does Lust Mean to Me?
Lust is different for me.
Of all the sins I have explored, this is one I have observed far more than I have felt within myself.
But I have been on the receiving end of its destructive force.
And I know what that feels like.
When I began thinking about Lust, I didn't want to explore the seductive version of it. I wanted to go much deeper, into the place where desire becomes selfish and another person's world becomes less important than satisfying that desire.
Because desire itself isn't something I consider sinful.
We desire people.
We desire experiences.
We desire success, attention, power and recognition.
Wanting is part of being human.
For me, the darkness begins when what we want becomes more important than who or what might be damaged in order to have it.
That is where Lust becomes ugly.
I have felt the consequences of somebody else's desire, and for a very long time its energy lived rent free inside my head.
It wasn't mine, yet I carried it.
It consumed parts of my being and left me trying to understand something that had been outside my control.
That is perhaps what I find most disturbing about Lust.
The person satisfying the desire and the person living with its consequences can experience two completely different realities.
One may have a moment.
The other can inherit years.
I wanted to lance that wound.
Art has given me a way of doing that.
Throughout this collection I have asked myself uncomfortable questions, but with Lust I found myself confronting something slightly different. Rather than asking where does this sin live within me?, I began asking:
What happens when somebody else's sin is allowed to live inside you?
For me, the answer has been to slowly take back ownership of that space.
I cannot change what has happened in my life, but I can change what I allow those experiences to become.
I can examine them.
Question them.
Turn them into something.
And, eventually, put them down.
Lust also made me question its supposed opposite: Chastity.
I don't find that relationship as simple as sin versus virtue.
Does restraint remove desire?
Does not acting upon something make the thought itself virtuous?
Can someone appear chaste while privately nurturing the very desires they claim to reject?
Those questions will become important as we move deeper into the painting.
But first I needed to understand what Lust meant to me.
It is not sex.
It is not attraction.
It is not desire.
It is desire without regard for consequence.
And perhaps creating this painting was my way of finally taking something that once had power over me and saying:
You don't get to own this space anymore.
Content Note
This journal explores the darker aspects of Lust and contains references to sexual exploitation, predatory behaviour, abuse of power and the harm caused by destructive desire. Some of the symbolism within the painting, including imagery involving the sexualisation of a child, may be distressing to some readers. These subjects are presented critically as part of my exploration of Lust, its consequences and the choices we make when confronted by our darker impulses.
Chapter One – When Desire Enters Someone Else’s World
There is a point where desire changes.
It stops being something felt within one person and begins to enter the life of another.
That is the part of Lust that interests me most.
We cannot control what another person thinks or desires. We cannot police another person's imagination, nor should we. But the moment desire becomes action, somebody else can become part of a decision they never made.
And sometimes they are not the only person affected.
There can be partners.
Children.
Families.
Friendships.
Trust.
Entire lives built around relationships that one act can suddenly fracture.
This is where I struggle with Lust.
It can be incredibly selfish.
The person consumed by desire can become so focused upon what they want that everything surrounding that desire seems to disappear.
I want this person.
I want this experience.
I want this feeling.
For that moment, I want becomes louder than what will this do?
And once that line has been crossed, there is no guarantee that the world simply returns to the way it was before.
I know that because I have experienced the other side of it.
What somebody else may have experienced as desire became something entirely different when it reached me.
Confusion.
Anger.
Pain.
Questions.
And perhaps worst of all, the endless replaying of something you had no control over.
That is why I described Lust as living rent free in my head.
I didn't consciously invite it in.
Yet there it was.
I could analyse it endlessly, trying to understand why another person had made particular choices, as though finding the perfect explanation might somehow undo their consequences.
It never did.
Eventually I began to understand that I was carrying something that didn't belong to me.
Their desire had become my burden.
That realisation mattered.
Because when somebody else's actions hurt us, there is a danger that we allow those actions to continue long after the event itself has ended.
We replay them.
Question them.
Imagine different outcomes.
Wonder what we could have done differently.
The original moment passes, but its consequences continue occupying space.
For me, that is one of the cruellest aspects of destructive Lust.
It can be extraordinarily brief for the person pursuing what they want and extraordinarily long for the person left trying to make sense of it.
One person's gratification can become another person's reconstruction.
And reconstruction takes time.
I have had to rebuild parts of myself that Lust once damaged.
Not by pretending it didn't matter.
Not by forgiving something simply because forgiveness is considered virtuous.
But by accepting that I cannot change what has already happened.
What I can decide is how much more of my life I am prepared to give it.
That is where creating this painting became important.
I could finally take something intangible and give it a form outside myself.
I could look directly at it.
And when I began imagining what Lust would look like if I stripped away all the glamour we attach to desire, I didn't see anything beautiful.
I saw something invasive.
Something hungry.
Something capable of forcing its way into a world that had been perfectly whole without it.
And that idea became the foundation for one of the most important symbols in the painting:
the bell jars.
Chapter Two – The Bell Jars: Fragile Worlds
I chose bell jars because I wanted each one to represent a complete world.
A life.
A relationship.
A family.
A childhood.
A future.
A person's sense of safety.
From the outside, these worlds can appear solid and protected. They have boundaries. They contain everything that makes that particular life what it is.
But I made them from glass for a reason.
Because our worlds are fragile.
We can spend years building a life and believing it is secure, yet sometimes it takes only one action, one decision or one person's desire to put a fracture through everything.
Glass protects, but glass can break.
That fragility became fundamental to the painting.
Each bell jar is its own beautiful, self-contained existence, and each is topped by an upright cross. Within the visual language of this collection, the cross marks these worlds as something that should remain intact.
Lust doesn't respect that boundary.
It breaks through it.
And once the glass has been shattered, what happens inside begins to change.
The central bell jar contains the most disturbing example.
Inside is a little girl on a swing.
Her world before Lust enters is deliberately beautiful. There are flowers, green grass and a healthy tree. It is an innocent world in which a child should be allowed simply to exist without understanding the darkness outside it.
Then the glass is broken.
The central figure of Lust forces its hand through the fracture and reaches towards her.
I wanted absolutely nothing seductive about this creature.
Its face has become primal and contorted. Its enormous tongue protrudes from its mouth, its tiny eyes fixate upon the object of its desire and its hands possess too many fingers, exaggerating that desperate need to reach, grasp and take.
The pupil of the eye reflects what it desires.
It sees the child, but it doesn't truly see her.
It sees only what it wants.
That distinction is horrifying to me.
And the moment Lust breaches the glass, the little girl's world begins to die.
The tree nearest the break has lost its leaves.
The grass disappears.
Weeds replace the flowers.
Those weeds travel through the broken glass and into the arm of Lust itself.
I wanted the damage to spread from the exact point of intrusion.
Before Lust, there was growth.
After Lust, there is decay.
The landscape becomes the emotional wound.
And this is where the fragility of the glass becomes particularly important to me.
When you break a glass object, you cannot simply pretend the break never happened.
Even if you carefully gather every piece and reconstruct it, the fracture may still be visible.
But visible damage does not mean the world is beyond repair.
That is something I understand differently now.
For a long time, I think I concentrated upon the moment of breaking.
What was damaged.
What was lost.
What could never be exactly as it had been before.
But perhaps there is another way to look at fractured glass.
It can be repaired.
The cracks become part of its history.
The world inside may change because of what happened to it, but it can continue.
That matters enormously to me because I am not interested in portraying the people affected by somebody else's Lust simply as destroyed things.
They are not.
A world can be fractured without being extinguished.
The other bell jars within the painting contain different lives and different desires, and we will come to those later.
But they all begin with the same idea.
We each inhabit worlds that feel permanent because we live inside them every day.
Our relationships.
Our families.
Our security.
Our beliefs about the people around us.
Our understanding of who we are.
We don't necessarily realise how delicate some of those structures are until something hits the glass.
That is why Lust doesn't merely occupy these bell jars.
It breaks them.
Its desire is momentary.
The fracture it creates may last considerably longer.
And behind the little girl, reflected within that damaged glass, is someone who outwardly appears to stand against everything Lust represents.
Chastity.
Dressed as a priest, an upright cross hangs prominently around his neck—the symbol of virtue presented clearly for us to see.
But what we cannot immediately see is far more important.
Because hidden inside his pocket are two photographs.
Chapter Three – Chastity: Lust Behind the Collar
Behind the little girl, reflected in the glass, stands Chastity.
I have dressed Chastity as a priest.
Around his neck hangs an upright cross, clearly visible and deliberately placed. Throughout this collection, the upright cross belongs to the virtue, while the inverted cross accompanies the sin.
From the outside, everything appears correct.
The collar.
The clothing.
The cross.
The restraint.
Here is someone who should represent moral discipline and the rejection of Lust.
But then look inside his pocket.
There are two photographs of the little girl.
In one, she is on the swing.
In the other, she is imprisoned.
Suddenly the reflection changes completely.
The priest may not have reached through the glass.
He may not have touched.
He may not have acted.
But the desire is still there.
And this is where I began questioning Chastity itself.
Is Chastity the absence of Lust, or is it simply Lust restrained?
For me, those are very different things.
We tend to judge morality through actions because actions are what we can see.
Someone resists temptation.
Therefore they are virtuous.
But what if everything remains underneath?
The fantasy.
The fixation.
The wanting.
The intention.
What if the only difference between Lust and Chastity is that one reaches through the glass and the other keeps its hands to itself?
That is why the photographs are hidden.
They represent the private world behind the public appearance.
The upright cross is visible to everyone.
The photographs are not.
That contradiction became central to my Chastity.
I don't believe restraint automatically removes desire. Sometimes it simply places a boundary around it.
And boundaries matter enormously.
Not acting upon a destructive desire protects other people from its consequences. That distinction cannot be dismissed.
But I wanted to question whether restraint alone should automatically be elevated into virtue.
My Chastity walks a tightrope.
On one side is self-control.
On the other is the desire it is continually controlling.
And beneath it waits Lust.
This is why I think of Chastity in this painting as Lust caged.
The cage is important.
It prevents the creature from acting.
It creates a boundary.
It may protect somebody else.
But it doesn't necessarily change what is inside.
And the photograph of the little girl imprisoned makes that idea even darker.
The fantasy has already taken possession of her.
She exists inside his private imagined world in a way she has never consented to.
The physical boundary remains intact, but mentally he has crossed it.
That is uncomfortable territory, and I wanted it to be.
Because throughout this series I have been interested in what happens when we make virtue too easy.
Wear the correct symbol.
Say the correct thing.
Perform the expected behaviour.
And perhaps nobody looks beneath it.
The cross around the priest's neck therefore becomes essential.
It tells us what he wants the world to see.
The photographs tell us what he doesn't.
I am not saying that having an unwanted thought makes somebody guilty of an action they have never committed. Thought and action are not the same thing, and that difference matters.
What I am questioning is the certainty with which we sometimes judge virtue purely from appearance.
We cannot see inside another person's mind.
We don't know what is being resisted.
We don't know what is being hidden.
And we certainly don't know whether the person presenting themselves as morally superior is quite as virtuous as the costume suggests.
That is why Chastity belongs in the reflection.
Lust is exposed.
Grotesque.
Obvious.
It makes no attempt to disguise what it wants.
Chastity is far more difficult to read.
It wears the upright cross.
It keeps its hands outside the glass.
It appears to have conquered desire.
But tucked safely inside its pocket, Lust is still looking back at us.
Chapter Four – The Many Faces of Lust
The central figure is deliberately the most disturbing representation of Lust in the painting, but it is not alone.
Across the painting are other bell jars.
Other worlds.
Other desires.
I wanted them there because Lust is too easily reduced to sex. The more I thought about it, the more I saw the same appetite appearing in completely different forms.
Lust can desire a person.
It can desire recognition.
It can desire glory.
It can desire control.
And it can desire power.
The object changes.
The hunger to possess remains.
When Lust Wants Someone Else's World
In another bell jar, a female figure of Lust has wrapped herself around the glass.
Inside is a man with his family.
She wants him.
But he does not exist alone. He belongs to a world already filled with relationships, history and people whose lives are connected to his.
Lust doesn't care.
Once again, the glass is broken.
This isn't intended as a simplistic story of one woman destroying a family. What interests me is the way desire can narrow our vision until we see only the thing we want and not everything attached to it.
Desire rarely arrives in an empty room.
There can be partners.
Children.
Families.
Friendships.
Promises.
Years of shared history.
Yet in the grip of Lust, all of those things can become inconvenient obstacles surrounding the object of desire.
The bell jar allows us to see what Lust refuses to see.
It sees the man.
We see his world.
And once again, that world is made from glass.
When Being Wanted Doesn't Mean Being Valued
Elsewhere, I show what can happen after Lust has taken what it wanted.
A woman lies with her clothing around her ankles.
There is no beautiful garden surrounding her.
No romance.
No seduction.
She has been left within a barren wasteland of dead trees and crows.
I wanted this scene to feel brutally empty.
The pursuit has finished.
The appetite has been satisfied.
And the person who was once the focus of such intense desire has been abandoned amongst the consequences.
There is something particularly cruel in that contradiction.
We can confuse being desperately wanted with being deeply valued.
They are not necessarily the same thing.
Lust can make someone feel like the most important person in the world while it wants them, and completely disposable once it doesn't.
The wasteland is what remains when the excitement has gone.
The crows have arrived.
Life has drained from the landscape.
And Lust has already turned its attention elsewhere.
Lust for Recognition
Then I wanted to move away from sexual desire altogether.
Another world contains awards and recognition.
Here the desired object isn't a person.
It is applause.
Status.
Glory.
Being noticed.
Being told that you matter.
I understand ambition. As an artist, of course I want my work to be seen. I want to achieve things. I want people to respond to what I create.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting recognition.
The danger comes when recognition stops being something we appreciate and becomes something we need.
How much are we prepared to sacrifice to remain admired?
How far will we go to receive another award?
What happens when applause becomes addictive?
And what happens when somebody else receives the attention we believe should have belonged to us?
Suddenly the object of Lust has changed, but the language hasn't.
I want.
I deserve.
Give it to me.
There may be no naked body involved at all.
But desire can still consume the person experiencing it.
Lust for Power
And then there is the politician.
This figure takes Lust into what I consider perhaps its most dangerous territory.
The lust for power.
The politician is positioned with a nuclear briefcase, possessing the ability to unleash destruction far beyond the individual worlds elsewhere in the painting.
Upon the figure are two political rosettes.
One red.
One blue.
These colours continue the political thread I have woven throughout this collection.
I am not interested in telling the viewer that one political side is virtuous and the other sinful.
That would completely miss my point.
Red or blue, the human appetite for power can exist behind either.
Different colours.
Different promises.
Different teams asking us to choose them.
But behind those colours can stand exactly the same desire:
Give me the power.
And on the nuclear weapon appears another word that repeatedly surfaces throughout this collection.
TAX.
I use that word deliberately.
Ordinary people work.
We contribute.
We pay into the systems governing us.
And those systems can use that collective contribution to create extraordinary things—but they can also create the machinery of destruction.
There is something deeply disturbing to me about ordinary people helping to finance weapons capable of annihilating ordinary people.
The very populations whose labour helps sustain the structure can ultimately find themselves beneath its threat.
That is why the word TAX belongs there.
And this is where Lust has travelled a very long way from sex.
The politician doesn't lust after a body.
He lusts after the ability to control bodies.
To command.
To threaten.
To dominate.
To determine what happens next.
At its most extreme, the power held within that briefcase represents the ability of a tiny number of human beings to affect millions of lives.
Millions of fragile worlds.
Millions of bell jars.
One decision could break them.
The red and blue rosettes almost become absurd beside that reality.
We argue about which colour should control the button.
I find myself asking a much darker question.
Why should anyone desire the power of the button in the first place?
The Same Creature Wearing Different Faces
This is why I needed several versions of Lust within the painting.
At first they appear to be telling completely different stories.
The pervert desires innocence.
The woman desires someone else's partner.
Another desires recognition and glory.
The politician desires power.
But strip away what each one wants and something disturbingly similar remains.
I want it.
Then:
I deserve it.
And finally:
What stands between me and having it matters less than my desire.
That is the point at which Lust becomes monstrous to me.
Not attraction.
Not consensual sexual desire.
Not ambition.
Not wanting to succeed.
Those are ordinary parts of being human.
My Lust begins when desire starts treating other people, their boundaries and their worlds as things that can be sacrificed in order to satisfy it.
That is why the creatures exist outside the bell jars.
They look in.
They fixate.
They circle.
They probe for somewhere to enter.
Inside the glass are lives already being lived.
Lust doesn't create those worlds.
It simply decides that something inside one of them belongs to it.
And when the boundary stands in its way, it doesn't ask permission.
It breaks the glass.
Chapter Five – When Desire Becomes Primal
I didn't want Lust to be beautiful.
That was important to me from the beginning.
Lust is so often portrayed through seduction: beautiful bodies, sensuality, temptation and eroticism. But that wasn't the Lust I wanted to expose.
I wanted to strip away the glamour and ask what uncontrolled desire might look like if we could actually see the appetite underneath it.
What emerged was something primal.
The figures wrapping themselves around the bell jars have distorted human faces. Their bodies remain recognisably human, but something within them has changed.
Reason is disappearing.
Conscience is becoming irrelevant.
Appetite is taking over.
Their enormous tongues lick towards the worlds they desire, tasting them before they have even entered them.
I exaggerated the tongues deliberately because there is something animalistic about them.
They don't speak.
They don't communicate.
They lick.
The tongue becomes an instrument of appetite rather than language.
There is no conversation with the world inside the glass because Lust isn't interested in what that world might have to say.
It is interested only in satisfying itself.
The Eyes That See Only What They Want
The eyes are small and beady, but within their pupils I have placed the objects of their desire.
That detail is incredibly important.
These creatures can look, but their vision has narrowed until they are capable of seeing only what they want.
Everything surrounding the object disappears.
The person becomes the desire.
The award becomes the desire.
The power becomes the desire.
Nothing else matters.
It is almost the opposite of the blindness I painted in Gluttony.
Gluttony had no eyes because it consumed without seeing.
Lust has eyes.
But it sees selectively.
Its gaze is completely focused upon possession.
Perhaps that is another kind of blindness.
Hands Made to Grasp
I also gave Lust too many fingers.
The hands needed to feel wrong.
Human, but exaggerated.
More fingers mean more ability to reach.
To probe.
To grasp.
To hold.
To take.
These aren't gentle hands.
They are extensions of the creature's desire.
Throughout the painting, Lust wraps itself around the fragile glass as though attempting to possess the entire world rather than merely the thing inside it.
That physicality matters.
The creature doesn't stand back and admire.
It envelops.
It clings.
It penetrates.
It takes up space that doesn't belong to it.
**Lust doesn't simply want to look at the world.
It wants its hands inside it.**
Bondage, Ownership and Control
On the central creature, I added a pierced tongue and a gold chain connecting its arms.
The imagery references bondage, but for me it also introduces the idea of ownership and control.
Because destructive Lust isn't always satisfied simply by obtaining something.
Sometimes it wants to possess it.
Control it.
Keep it.
Determine what happens to it.
The word LUST is tattooed directly onto the creature.
There is no disguise here.
Unlike Chastity hiding behind clothing, a collar and an upright cross, Lust makes no claim to virtue.
It wears its appetite openly.
That difference interests me.
Chastity hides.
Lust displays.
Yet beneath the surface, the desire may be remarkably similar.
The Inverted Cross
The figures of Lust wear inverted crosses as adornment.
Again, this continues the language running through the entire Seven Deadly Sins collection.
The virtue carries the cross upright.
The sin turns it upside down.
But here I wanted the cross to feel almost decorative.
Lust has taken something representing a moral boundary and turned it into jewellery.
It doesn't fear judgement.
It wears its rejection of restraint proudly.
That feels appropriate for these creatures because there is very little internal conflict left in them.
They aren't standing at the edge wondering whether they should cross it.
They already have.
The struggle between wanting and restraint belongs to Chastity.
Lust has surrendered to appetite completely.
“As Horny as a Roman Sandal”
And amongst all this darkness, I included one of the idioms that runs through these paintings.
“As horny as a Roman sandal.”
There is something deliberately ridiculous about the phrase.
I like that.
These paintings deal with difficult subjects, but I still use humour, idiom and absurdity as part of my visual language.
And perhaps there is something appropriate about mocking Lust.
Because once all the supposed glamour has been stripped away, what remains isn't particularly sophisticated.
For all the excuses human beings can construct around desire, the creature underneath can be remarkably basic.
Want.
Take.
Consume.
The contorted bodies make that ugliness visible.
They are what happens when I remove seduction from Lust and leave only appetite behind.
There is nothing romantic about them.
Nothing beautiful.
Nothing I want the viewer to desire.
They are grotesque because the behaviour I am exploring feels grotesque to me.
And while these creatures cling desperately to their fragile worlds, something else is happening beneath them.
The bell jars rise directly from fire and brimstone.
Lust may be completely absorbed by what it wants above.
But below, its punishment has already begun.
Chapter Six – Fire and Brimstone
Beneath the bell jars, the world is burning.
I placed each of these fragile worlds above fire and brimstone, because this is the traditional punishment awaiting Lust in Hell.
But I didn't want the flames to exist simply as decoration.
They are the destination.
Above them, Lust is completely consumed by desire.
Below them are those who have already discovered where that desire leads.
Amongst the burning coals are the screaming sinners of Lust.
Faces and bodies emerge from the flames, trapped within the punishment that waits beneath the worlds they once tried to possess.
There is something I find particularly fitting about fire as Lust's punishment.
Lust itself can burn.
We talk about burning desire.
Burning passion.
Being consumed by someone or something.
The language of desire is already filled with heat.
So I took that heat and turned it against the sin.
What once burned as desire now burns as punishment.
There is no pleasure left in it.
No excitement.
No anticipation.
Only consequence.
The Gluttony Devil
Sitting amongst this inferno is the Gluttony Devil.
He appears remarkably pleased with himself.
He smiles while extending his hand, and within the flames beside him a head screams in agony.
As with the other Devils in this collection, he doesn't need to force the sin towards destruction.
Lust has managed that perfectly well by itself.
He waits.
He watches.
And he seems to enjoy knowing what Lust does not.
The creatures above are so fixated upon the worlds they desire that they have barely noticed what is underneath them.
That makes the Devil's smile particularly sinister to me.
He already knows the ending.
Lust thinks only about obtaining what it wants.
The Devil thinks about what happens afterwards.
Consumed by the Same Fire
There is an irony in placing the Gluttony Devil here.
Gluttony consumes.
Lust is consumed.
One appetite meets another.
The creatures of Lust have spent the painting trying to devour the people, power and worlds that attract them, yet eventually they become part of another appetite entirely.
The hunter becomes the hunted.
The consumer becomes the consumed.
And the flames do not care how beautiful, powerful, important or irresistible the object of desire once appeared.
Everything burns the same.
That is important because Lust can convince itself that its desire is exceptional.
This is different.
This person is different.
This feeling is different.
The normal rules shouldn't apply.
Human beings can become remarkably inventive when justifying something they desperately want.
But consequence is rarely interested in our excuses.
Pandora’s Box
Above the bell jars sits another symbol that appears throughout this collection:
Pandora's Box.
I use it as a reminder of what human beings carry within themselves.
The impulses.
The desires.
The destructive possibilities.
The things that may remain contained until something opens the lid.
In Lust, that feels particularly appropriate.
Desire can exist without destruction.
It can remain contained, understood and controlled.
But once appetite begins overriding boundaries, something has been released.
And, like Pandora's story, putting everything neatly back afterwards may not be possible.
That doesn't mean desire itself should remain locked away.
I don't believe that.
It means we are responsible for what we choose to release into somebody else's world.
Because once the glass is broken, saying I didn't mean to cause all this doesn't magically rebuild it.
What the Flames Cannot Reach
And yet I refused to allow the fire to consume the entire painting.
Around the burning landscape is something untouched.
The flames rage.
The sinners scream.
The Devil waits.
The bell jars fracture.
But beyond all of it, the fire stops.
It cannot consume everything.
That boundary matters enormously to me.
Because if I had allowed Lust's fire to destroy the whole landscape, I would have given it something I no longer believe it deserves.
Absolute power.
Lust can damage a world.
It can leave scars.
It can create consequences that extend far beyond the moment of desire.
But it does not automatically get to own everything that comes afterwards.
There is still somewhere beyond the flames.
And through that untouched landscape moves the white dove.
For me, that is where the story of Lust finally begins to change.
Because the next question is no longer about what Lust destroys.
It is about what we choose to rebuild after the fire.
Chapter Seven – Eden: The Choice Not to Give In
Beyond the fire and brimstone is Eden.
As with every painting in this collection, I have deliberately made Eden accessible.
It isn't hidden.
It isn't locked behind gates.
It isn't somewhere impossible to reach.
It is right there.
And through it flies the white dove.
This is important to the philosophy running through all seven paintings because Eden represents choice.
We all have our sinful sides.
We experience anger.
Envy.
Pride.
Greed.
Gluttony.
Lust.
The existence of those impulses doesn't automatically determine what we do with them.
There is always a moment before action.
And that is where Eden exists.
Lust Has a Choice
This matters particularly with Lust because I don't believe desire itself is the sin I am portraying.
People desire.
People fantasise.
People are attracted to one another.
People want power, success, recognition and countless other things.
That is human nature.
The choice comes in what we do with those desires.
Lust can look through the glass.
It can want what is inside.
It can feel every part of that desire.
But it does not have to break the glass.
That distinction is fundamental to this painting.
The bell jar is the boundary.
On one side is desire.
On the other is action.
And Eden remains available while that boundary is still respected.
The sinner can turn away.
The Dove
The white dove appears throughout this collection as a symbol of hope, purity and freedom from the sin.
It doesn't force anyone towards Eden.
That would defeat the point.
It simply shows that another path exists.
For me, that is important.
I don't want these paintings to suggest that human beings are powerless creatures being dragged around by their worst impulses.
Quite the opposite.
We have agency.
We can experience something without surrendering to it.
We can want without taking.
We can be tempted without acting.
We can recognise the monster inside ourselves without allowing it to control what happens next.
That is where responsibility begins.
Before the Glass Breaks
There is a tiny space between wanting something and deciding to act upon that want.
Sometimes it may last seconds.
Sometimes considerably longer.
But within that space is choice.
I think that is where Eden sits in this painting.
Before the hand enters the glass.
Before the family is fractured.
Before another person becomes collateral damage.
Before power becomes domination.
Before desire creates consequences that cannot simply be withdrawn.
There is still an opportunity to stop.
Once the glass has been broken, saying I shouldn't have done that doesn't make it whole again.
That is why the choice beforehand matters so much.
Eden Is Not Perfection
I don't see Eden as a place occupied by people who never experience sinful thoughts.
If that were the case, I'm not sure many of us would qualify.
Certainly not me.
For me, Eden represents the possibility of recognising those parts of ourselves and deciding that they do not always have to be obeyed.
We can acknowledge Lust without feeding it.
That is very different from pretending it doesn't exist.
And perhaps this is where Chastity becomes complicated again.
Restraint can protect the glass.
Whatever might be happening inside the mind, choosing not to harm another person matters.
The thought and the action are not equal.
The boundary matters.
But true choice, for me, goes further than simply appearing virtuous.
It requires recognising the desire for what it is and accepting responsibility for what would happen if we acted upon it.
Within Easy Reach
That is why Eden surrounds the destruction rather than existing somewhere far beyond it.
The sinner does not need an impossible journey towards goodness.
Sometimes the choice is remarkably simple.
Don't reach through the glass.
Don't take what isn't yours.
Don't sacrifice somebody else's world to satisfy a moment of desire.
Turn away.
The flames are there.
But so is the grass.
The punishment is there.
But so is the dove.
The sinful impulse is there.
But so is the choice.
That is what Eden means throughout this collection.
I am not painting humanity as naturally virtuous.
Nor am I painting us as hopelessly sinful.
I am painting us somewhere between the two.
Able to move in either direction.
And in Lust, perhaps that entire choice can be reduced to one simple moment:
The glass is still intact.
Do you break it?
Epilogue – Taking Back What Lust Took
I began this painting from a very different position to many of the other sins.
I wasn't trying to understand a part of myself that I regularly wrestled with.
I was trying to understand the impact of something I had experienced from somebody else.
That distinction made Lust difficult.
Because when another person's actions have affected you deeply, there is a temptation to keep searching for an explanation.
Why?
Why would somebody do that?
Why was what they wanted more important than the consequences?
Why couldn't they stop?
Why didn't they think about the people who might be hurt?
I spent far too much time asking questions for which I was never going to receive satisfactory answers.
Eventually I realised something.
I didn't need their answer.
I needed mine.
Painting What I Couldn't Control
That is one of the extraordinary things art has given me.
I cannot rewrite events.
But I can decide what I do with the emotions they leave behind.
For years, Lust had been this ugly energy that occupied part of my mind. I described it earlier as living there rent free, and that is exactly how it felt.
Something created by somebody else had somehow become mine to carry.
Painting it changed the relationship.
I could take that energy and put it somewhere physical.
In front of me.
On canvas.
And suddenly I was the one making the decisions.
That mattered.
I decided what Lust looked like.
I decided how ugly it became.
I decided how much destruction it was capable of causing.
And I could finally stand outside it and look back.
The Fractures Remain
I don't believe difficult experiences simply disappear because we decide we have dealt with them.
Some things leave marks.
I have mine.
But I no longer think every scar needs to be erased.
There are fractures in me that I have spent years knitting back together.
They are part of who I am.
What has changed is that I no longer see those fractures only as evidence of what somebody else did.
They are also evidence of what I rebuilt afterwards.
That belongs to me.
Perhaps this is why the process of creating the Seven Deadly Sins has become far more personal than I originally expected.
I thought I was painting human behaviour.
Instead, I keep finding pieces of my own life buried underneath it.
Sometimes I recognise the sinner.
Sometimes I recognise the person affected by the sin.
And sometimes I recognise both.
Lust Doesn't Get the Last Word
I have learned something important while creating this painting.
What happened may have been outside my control.
What I do with it now isn't.
I don't have to keep feeding the anger.
I don't have to keep replaying the questions.
And I don't have to allow somebody else's choices to remain permanently connected to my sense of self.
That doesn't excuse destructive behaviour.
It doesn't rewrite history.
It simply means I refuse to continue paying for somebody else's moment of desire with pieces of my own life.
That feels very different from forgiveness.
It is release.
And perhaps that is what I needed from this painting all along.
Not an explanation.
Not an apology.
Not even an answer.
Just somewhere to finally put it.
So I painted Lust in its ugliest form.
I exposed it.
I questioned it.
I gave it a world of its own.
And then I did something that once seemed much harder.
I left it there.
Lust — Beyond the Desire
Lust began with a deceptively simple problem.
What does Lust actually look like?
That question became part of a much larger three-year journey into the Seven Deadly Sins, their opposing virtues and the uncomfortable contradictions I found between them.
The Seven Deadly Sins Collection is where that journey begins. It explores why I returned to these ancient ideas and the questions about human behaviour, morality and consequence that made me want to examine them again.
The Lust Creation Gallery shows you what happened when those questions reached the painting surface.
There, you can see my struggle to find Lust's face—the more conventional expression I considered and rejected in favour of something far more primal. You can follow the changing layers, watch Eden retreat when it became too dominant and see the painting gradually grow from an early idea into the intricate finished work.
Lust may be driven by impulse.
Creating it required the opposite.
Patience. Restraint. Reconsideration. And countless decisions about what should demand attention and what should quietly step back.
Here, in the Artist Journal, you have travelled beyond the process and into the finished painting itself.
You have discovered why I chose these particular images, what lies behind the bell jars, the fire, Chastity, the figures and the smaller details that might easily disappear on a first viewing.
Because my question was never simply whether desire is wrong.
It was what happens when desire becomes more important than consequence.
The Collection asks why I began questioning the Sins.
The Creation Gallery shows how I found Lust and built its world.
The Artist Journal reveals what lies beneath the desire.
Three parts of the same story.
And perhaps now, when you return to the finished painting, the face at its centre looks a little different.
It isn't there to seduce you.
It is there to confront you with Lust.
Coming soon: watch the complete creation of Lust in video, from the search for its face to the final brushstroke.
Continue Exploring The Seven Deadly Sins
Explore the Other Artist Journals
Every Sin has its own story. Enter the other paintings and discover the symbolism, personal thoughts and questions hidden within
Seven paintings. Seven virtues. Seven very different ways of looking at what makes us human.
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