Sloth Painting: Wasted Time and the Seven Deadly Sins | Julia O'Sullivan
Updated: Sep 1
Sloth Painting by Julia O'Sullivan
Introduction – What Does Sloth Mean to Me?
I despise this sin.
There, I've said it.
Of all the Seven Deadly Sins, Sloth probably brings out the strongest reaction in me. There is something about deliberately wasting time and making no effort with the life you have been given that I find incredibly difficult to understand.
Perhaps because time is so precious.
We get one life, and watching someone willingly allow theirs to drift past while expecting very little from themselves can infuriate me.
But I need to make an important distinction.
Sloth is not rest.
It isn't exhaustion.
It isn't having a duvet day, shutting the curtains and deciding the world can manage perfectly well without you for twenty-four hours.
We all need that.
The Sloth I am exploring is something much deeper.
For me, Sloth is a mindset.
It is when doing nothing stops being an occasional pleasure and becomes a way of life. When one day becomes another, then another, until months and years disappear with very little changing.
And yet there is something about Sloth that I find particularly fascinating.
It isn't always as lazy as it appears.
Sometimes an extraordinary amount of cleverness can go into avoiding effort.
I've witnessed people become remarkably skilled at ensuring somebody else carries their burden. They can manipulate kindness, circumstance and relationships while convincing themselves that they are somehow entitled to what others have worked for.
That is the Sloth that makes my blood boil.
But creating this collection has repeatedly forced me to question my own certainty.
Because if I condemn someone for doing too little, what happens at the opposite extreme?
Can we work too much?
Can hard work itself become unhealthy?
Can the person who always gives, always works and always carries everybody else eventually become just as trapped as the person who refuses to move?
That question became important as I developed this painting.
And, as with every sin in this collection, I eventually had to look beyond my judgement of other people and back towards myself.
Where does Sloth exist in me?
Where have I wasted time?
Where have I avoided something because doing nothing was easier?
Where have I allowed another day to disappear while promising myself I would deal with it tomorrow?
I may despise Sloth, but that doesn't place me above it.
None of these paintings do.
That's rather the point.
We all have our moments.
The difference, perhaps, is what we choose to do with the next one.
And of all the sins I've painted, there is one thing I can say about Sloth with absolute certainty:
Sloth brings forth my Wrath.
Chapter One – The Black Hole of Doing Nothing
Sloth frustrates me because it can look like nothing is happening.
But nothing is happening.
That is precisely the problem.
There is an energy to Sloth that I can only describe as a black hole. It absorbs time, opportunity, purpose and eventually, I think, something of the person themselves.
Days disappear into it.
Then weeks.
Then years.
There is always tomorrow.
Tomorrow I'll start.
Tomorrow I'll change.
Tomorrow I'll sort it out.
Tomorrow becomes an extraordinarily convenient place because it never actually has to arrive.
And this is where I separate Sloth from procrastination. We all procrastinate. I certainly do. We avoid jobs we don't fancy, waste an afternoon, scroll through nonsense when we should be doing something useful and occasionally achieve absolutely nothing.
That's human.
The Sloth I'm interested in has made a home there.
There is no urgency because someone or something will usually keep life moving around it.
And that is the part I find particularly difficult.
When Somebody Else Carries the Weight
I have encountered people who seem capable of putting more thought into avoiding responsibility than taking responsibility would ever have required.
That isn't stupidity.
It can be remarkably clever.
They learn people.
They recognise generosity.
They discover who will rescue them, who will pay, who will forgive and who can be persuaded to carry just a little bit more.
Then they work upon those relationships.
This is where I think Sloth can become manipulative.
I have seen people take advantage of the kindness and good fortune of others because maintaining their own lifestyle requires somebody else to provide the effort.
And strangely, entitlement can begin to grow alongside it.
What started as:
Can you help me?
can slowly become:
You should help me.
And eventually:
Why haven't you helped me?
The person doing the least can somehow become aggrieved with the person doing the most.
That infuriates me.
Sloth Within Families
Families can provide particularly fertile ground for this behaviour because love makes boundaries complicated.
There can be somebody who always needs rescuing.
Somebody who always needs money.
Somebody whose latest disaster somehow becomes everybody else's responsibility.
And sometimes the manipulation is much quieter than that.
Attention can be carefully cultivated.
A parent can be gently persuaded that one child cares more than another.
Favour can be won.
Relationships can be subtly separated.
The manipulation doesn't necessarily announce itself as manipulation.
It can arrive disguised as concern.
And then there are those moments when money, possessions or inheritance become involved.
Funerals can reveal extraordinary things about the living.
Grief hasn't even had time to settle before questions of who gets what begin creeping through the door.
I've witnessed enough of human behaviour to know that sometimes people become remarkably energetic when there is something to gain.
And there is the contradiction.
Suddenly Sloth can move.
Not necessarily to build something for itself, but to secure something somebody else has already built.
That is why I don't see Sloth simply as laziness.
Clever at Doing Nothing
My Sloth can be resourceful.
It can calculate.
It can persuade.
It can groom circumstances in its favour.
It may even encourage others to behave similarly because shared behaviour creates justification.
Everyone does it.
Why should I work when I don't have to?
I'm entitled to this.
The energy isn't directed towards creating a life.
It is directed towards maintaining a life that requires as little personal effort as possible.
And perhaps that's why I react so strongly to it.
There is something deeply sad about wasted potential.
Not because everyone should be ambitious.
Not because everyone needs wealth, status, careers or achievements.
Absolutely not.
A quiet life can be an enormously rich one.
Purpose doesn't have to impress anybody.
But I believe there is a difference between choosing a simple existence and simply refusing to participate in your own.
Sloth, as I see it, slowly withdraws from that participation.
The world continues.
Other people move.
Time passes.
And Sloth remains exactly where it was.
That idea became the starting point for the physical world I created in this painting.
I needed somewhere in which time could disappear without Sloth even noticing it was going.
So I put Sloth beneath the water.
Chapter Two – Drowning in Wasted Time
I wanted Sloth to exist in a place where nothing really happens.
So I submerged her.
She floats in a dark pit of water, neither properly swimming nor completely drowning. Her head is barely above the surface, her body wasted and pale, simply bobbing there.
She could move.
She doesn't.
She could try to climb out.
She doesn't.
She exists in a state of semi-drowning, doing just enough to remain where she is but nothing to change it.
That distinction is important.
Sloth isn't being held beneath the water by another person. There is no hand pushing her down. No oppressor standing above her.
She has surrendered herself to the pit.
A Body Wasting Alongside Time
Sloth is naked, as are the central figures throughout much of this collection. There is nowhere for her to hide and nothing to disguise what she has become.
Her body has begun to waste away.
It isn't the body of someone resting.
It is the physical manifestation of prolonged disengagement.
Even the position of her body is passive. There is no urgency in it despite the fact that the water sits dangerously close to her mouth.
And that is something I wanted to exaggerate.
Sloth can be surrounded by consequences and still do nothing about them.
On the surface floats alcohol, positioned so that it can simply pop into her open mouth.
She doesn't even need to lift her head to drink it.
There is also a syringe embedded in her arm.
These aren't there because I believe addiction and Sloth are the same thing. They aren't.
Here they represent another means of checking out—another way this particular figure has chosen to remain detached from the life passing around her.
Everything comes to Sloth.
Sloth reaches for nothing.
Even indulgence requires virtually no effort.
“As Lazy as a Toad”
Clinging to her leg is a toad.
This is my literal play on the expression “as lazy as a toad.”
I use idioms throughout the Seven Deadly Sins because they allow me to take familiar phrases and physically bury them within the paintings.
But here I also like the toad because it seems completely at home with Sloth.
It clings.
It sits.
It goes nowhere.
There is almost a strange companionship between them.
Two creatures content to remain exactly where they are.
When Time Loses Meaning
Surrounding Sloth are the remains of clocks.
Not beautiful, functioning timepieces.
Fragments.
Gears.
Mechanisms.
Numbers.
Broken pieces of measured time accumulating in the darkness.
Time has become debris.
This is perhaps the part of Sloth that troubles me most.
You cannot see time disappearing while you are inside it.
There is no great announcement when an hour has been wasted.
Nothing sounds when a year has slipped away.
It simply goes.
The clock parts accumulate because Sloth has stopped measuring life by what she does with it.
Yesterday resembles today.
Today will resemble tomorrow.
Eventually the distinction hardly matters.
And above everything I created a great vortex in the sky.
Time isn't merely passing here.
It is being swallowed.
The movement of the vortex contrasts with the stillness of Sloth below. Everything around her is moving while she remains suspended in the same place.
That is the contradiction I wanted.
The universe does not become idle simply because we do.
Time continues regardless.
Almost at the Surface
Perhaps the cruellest part of Sloth's position is how close she is to the surface.
She isn't buried miles beneath the water.
Her head is there.
Almost out.
The possibility of movement is tantalisingly close.
That was deliberate.
I didn't want Sloth's predicament to appear impossible.
If there were no possibility of escape, then I couldn't blame her for remaining there.
But she is close enough to air to remind us that this is not simply imprisonment.
Something else is keeping her in place.
Look beneath the water and we begin to see what.
Heavy chains descend from Sloth's body into the machinery below.
At their ends are enormous golden anchors.
But these aren't ordinary anchors.
They are inverted crosses.
And Sloth is not simply attached to them.
She is holding on.
Chapter Three – The Anchors We Choose
Beneath Sloth, two heavy chains disappear into the depths.
At the end of them are enormous golden inverted crosses, used as anchors to hold her beneath the water.
But there is an important detail.
Sloth is holding the chains herself.
Nobody has tied them around her.
Nobody is standing above her forcing her to remain in the pit.
She could let go.
That was essential to the way I wanted to portray this sin.
If I had chained Sloth against her will, she would have become a victim of her circumstances. That isn't what I wanted to say.
My Sloth has become complicit in her own stagnation.
She remains almost at the surface, close enough to life to see it continuing around her, yet still she holds onto the very things preventing her from reaching it.
The Weight of Choice
Throughout this collection I use the inverted cross for the sin and the upright cross for the virtue.
Here the inverted crosses don't simply identify Sloth.
They have weight.
They pull downwards.
And because they are anchors, they prevent movement.
For me, they represent all the things we can cling to when remaining exactly where we are feels easier than changing.
Excuses.
Habits.
Avoidance.
Dependence.
Fear of effort.
Perhaps even the comfort of having somebody else take responsibility.
One link may not feel particularly significant.
But eventually a chain is created.
And once we have lived a certain way for long enough, the familiar can begin to feel safer than the possibility of something different.
Even when the familiar is slowly drowning us.
She Only Has to Let Go
I deliberately made the anchors enormous.
Looking at them, you might assume escape would require tremendous strength.
How could Sloth possibly drag those huge golden crosses back towards the surface?
But she doesn't need to.
She isn't required to lift them.
She only needs to open her hands.
That changes everything.
The apparent impossibility of escape is partly an illusion.
The weight remains enormous only for as long as she insists upon holding it.
And I think there is something painfully human in that.
Sometimes we can become so accustomed to the things keeping us in one place that we begin defending them.
This is just who I am.
Nothing will ever change.
What's the point?
Eventually we can convince ourselves that we are trapped when, somewhere along the way, we have forgotten to ask whether we are still holding the chain.
What Waits Below
The chains lead Sloth down towards the darkest part of the painting.
Far beneath her is a pit of snakes, the traditional punishment for Sloth.
Amongst them sits the Greed Devil, casually playing with the creatures while Pandora's Box lies nearby.
I don't need the Devil to drag Sloth towards him.
That would undermine the entire point.
He can wait.
Sloth is already anchored in his direction.
And perhaps there is something particularly appropriate about the Greed Devil waiting for her. The Sloth I am exploring can depend heavily upon what other people provide—money, effort, time, rescue—while contributing increasingly little itself.
Greed wants to acquire.
Sloth wants the benefit without the effort.
Different sins, but they can feed one another remarkably well.
Yet even now, the punishment is not inevitable.
Sloth is not amongst the snakes.
There is still distance between them.
There is still time.
And, most importantly, she still has her hands around those chains.
She can continue holding them.
Or she can let go.
Above the water, however, I painted the exact opposite.
There are people who certainly haven't chosen to do nothing.
They work.
They carry.
They support an entire city.
And instead of inverted crosses, they are attached to an enormous cross standing the right way up.
This is Diligence.
But when I looked more closely at the virtue of hard work, I found another kind of chain.
Chapter Four – Diligence: When Virtue Becomes Exploitation
Above the water is the reflection of Sloth's supposed opposite:
Diligence.
The difference is immediate.
Sloth chooses to do almost nothing.
Diligence works.
And works.
And works.
But I didn't want to paint Diligence simply as the admirable answer to Sloth. As I have done with every virtue in this collection, I wanted to turn it over and look underneath.
Because hard work can be a wonderful thing.
It can give us independence, purpose, satisfaction and pride in what we achieve.
But there is a darker question here:
What happens when somebody else discovers how useful your diligence is to them?
Carrying the City
My figures of Diligence are literally holding up a city.
They are the workforce beneath the structure.
Without their labour, everything above them would fall.
I wanted to make visible something we often don't see.
Behind almost everything we consume, use or enjoy is somebody else's work.
Someone built it.
Someone grew it.
Someone cleaned it.
Someone transported it.
Someone maintained it.
Someone got up that morning and did what needed to be done.
The city depends upon these people.
Yet the people supporting it remain underneath.
They carry the weight of a world that could not exist without them.
The Golden Cross
The workers are chained to an enormous golden cross standing the right way up.
It mirrors the inverted crosses beneath Sloth, but its meaning is different.
This is the cross of virtue.
Diligence is doing what society tells us is right.
Work.
Contribute.
Be useful.
Be responsible.
But I deliberately added the chains because I wanted to question what happens when those expectations cease to be choices.
The cross may be upright.
The people are still chained to it.
Across it is the word TAX.
This word appears repeatedly throughout the collection because it has become part of the system I am questioning.
We earn through our labour and contribute from that labour towards the society around us.
That in itself isn't what I'm attacking.
What interests me is the enormous structure that can grow above ordinary people while continually requiring more from those underneath to sustain it.
How much of a human lifetime can be demanded in the name of contribution before the individual begins disappearing beneath the demand?
Red or Blue
On either side of this structure are the colours that run through several of these paintings:
red and blue.
They are not there to tell you which political party I support or which one I condemn.
They represent the political choice we are repeatedly offered.
Red or blue.
Choose.
The government may change.
The promises may change.
The language may change.
But tomorrow morning millions of people will still get up and go to work.
The city needs them.
That is where my recurring idea of choice, but no choice enters the painting again.
We can choose between the colours.
Most of us cannot choose whether we need to earn enough to live.
Losing the Individual
The figures carrying the city have identification numbers upon their foreheads.
I wanted them to begin losing their identities.
Within a vast economic structure, it is remarkably easy for a human being to become information.
An employee number.
A payroll number.
A tax reference.
A statistic.
A productivity figure.
But behind every number is something the system cannot manufacture more of:
a human lifetime.
That person has only so many years.
So many mornings.
So many hours.
And I find it disturbing that we can measure the productivity of those hours far more easily than we measure what they cost the person giving them.
When Diligence Has Given Everything
Beneath these workers are coffins filled with skulls.
Many skulls share each coffin.
I didn't want individual graves.
I wanted the uncomfortable sense of one workforce following another.
The diligent work until they can work no longer.
Eventually they disappear.
Another worker takes their place.
Another number appears.
Another lifetime begins supporting the structure.
And the city continues.
That is the point at which my Diligence stops being virtuous.
Not when somebody works hard.
Not when they want to achieve.
Not when they contribute.
But when their willingness to work is treated as an endlessly exploitable resource.
Sloth gives nothing and expects others to carry the burden.
Diligence carries so much that others begin expecting it to carry everything.
They are opposite extremes, but both disturb me for entirely different reasons.
And yet I haven't allowed those discarded lives beneath Diligence simply to disappear.
Their skulls continue across beneath the water.
Something begins to happen around them.
Roots appear.
New growth pushes through.
For the moment, I will leave them there.
Because what those remains eventually nourish changes the direction of the painting completely.
Chapter Five – What Grows From a Life
Beneath Diligence, the skulls do not simply disappear.
They travel beneath the water towards the other side of the painting, and there I allow something completely different to happen.
They begin to feed the roots of Eden.
I wanted this transition to be gradual.
The people above may have been worked until they were considered spent and replaceable, but what remains of them becomes part of something living.
Roots reach down towards the skulls.
Small shoots begin to appear beneath the water.
Life pushes into a place where, on Sloth's side, almost everything has stagnated.
That contrast is deliberate.
Life Beneath the Water
The water itself isn't the problem.
Sloth and these new shoots exist beneath the same surface.
Yet one is wasting away while the other is beginning to grow.
That matters to me because I didn't want this painting to suggest that circumstances alone determine what becomes of us.
The environment can be difficult.
Life can weigh heavily.
Systems can exploit.
People can take advantage.
But somewhere within all of that there can still be movement.
A root searches.
A shoot pushes upwards.
Something tries.
That tiny act of growth becomes the complete opposite of Sloth.
Life naturally reaches for life.
Sloth has stopped reaching.
What We Leave Behind
There is another reason I wanted the skulls to nourish these roots.
A person's value isn't confined to their productivity.
Those workers may have been reduced to identification numbers by the city, but their existence was far greater than the work extracted from them.
Human beings leave things behind.
What we teach.
What we create.
What we build.
The people we help.
The knowledge we pass on.
The changes we make in somebody else's life without ever realising we made them.
Even after a person is gone, those things can continue growing.
I find that much more meaningful than the idea that the purpose of a life is simply to work until it ends.
The city may have used their labour.
It doesn't get to define the value of their lives.
Death Feeding Life
There is something very natural about death feeding new life.
Everything returns.
Everything changes.
What has finished becomes nourishment for something that hasn't yet begun.
So the skulls aren't there only as symbols of death.
As they move towards Eden, their meaning changes.
On the Diligence side, they show the terrible disposability of human labour.
Here, they become fertile ground.
The same object can carry two completely different meanings depending upon where we encounter it.
That is something I enjoy doing throughout these paintings.
Nothing has to remain what it first appears to be.
The Opposite of Stagnation
And then I look back across the water at Sloth.
She is alive.
But she barely participates in that life.
The workers are dead.
Yet something of them continues to nourish what comes next.
I find that contradiction incredibly powerful.
Sloth has life but allows it to stagnate.
The dead have lost life, yet what they leave behind continues to grow.
For me, that brings the painting back to its real subject.
Time.
Not simply whether we work or whether we rest, but what we do with the limited amount of existence available to us.
I don't believe every life needs some grand achievement attached to it.
We don't all need to build empires, become wealthy, collect awards or leave our names in history.
That would simply introduce Pride, Greed and Envy through another door.
A meaningful life can be quiet.
It can be ordinary.
It can be known intimately by only a handful of people.
But it has been lived.
That is the distinction I wanted.
Towards Eden
The roots continue upwards.
The shoots become stronger.
And eventually they reach the landscape of Eden.
Eden has been visible all along.
As in every painting in this collection, it isn't a reward reserved for the perfect.
It isn't hidden somewhere unreachable.
And nobody is being forced towards it.
It represents something much simpler.
Choice.
Sloth can remain holding those chains.
Diligence can remain beneath the weight of the city.
Or somewhere between doing nothing and giving everything, there is another possibility.
The dove already knows where it is.
And in the next chapter, we finally follow it.
Chapter Six – Eden: The Choice to Live
On the opposite side of the water is Eden.
As with every painting in this collection, Eden represents choice.
I deliberately make it accessible.
There is no impossible mountain to climb, no locked gate and no great obstacle separating the sinner from it.
The possibility of another path is right there.
And once again, the white dove moves freely within it.
For Sloth, I think Eden has perhaps its simplest meaning of all:
Choose to participate in your own life.
Eden Does Not Demand Achievement
I don't want Eden to be misunderstood as a reward for working harder.
That would completely contradict what I have just shown through Diligence.
The answer to Sloth isn't to work yourself into the grave.
It isn't endless productivity.
It isn't wealth, status or success.
And it certainly isn't measuring the value of your existence by how much somebody else can extract from you.
Eden asks for neither extreme.
You don't have to conquer the world.
You simply have to live in it.
That might mean creating something.
Growing something.
Loving somebody.
Learning.
Helping.
Exploring.
Sitting quietly in a garden and appreciating that you are there.
Purpose doesn't need to be impressive to anybody else.
It simply needs to mean that we haven't surrendered our entire existence to nothing.
The Roots Beneath Eden
This is why the roots beneath Eden matter so much.
They reach down through the water towards the remains of Diligence.
The skulls that represented expendable workers in the previous chapter now become part of something new.
They nourish the roots.
Life begins to sprout even beneath the water.
I wanted nature to do what the city failed to do:
recognise value in what it had discarded.
But this isn't me saying those people needed to work themselves to death in order for their lives to have meaning.
Quite the opposite.
Their value was always greater than their productivity.
The city simply failed to recognise it.
Eden does.
The Dove Is Free
The white dove isn't chained.
It has no identification number.
It isn't attached to an upright cross or an inverted one.
It doesn't belong to the city.
And it isn't submerged with Sloth.
It can move between worlds.
That freedom is important.
Throughout these paintings, the dove represents the possibility of choosing something beyond the sin.
It doesn't drag anyone towards Eden.
It simply shows that Eden exists.
Because choice has to remain choice.
Sloth Could Reach It
This is what makes Sloth's position so frustrating to me.
Eden isn't far away.
She doesn't need to become Diligence to reach it.
She doesn't need to carry the city.
She doesn't need to prove her worth through work.
She doesn't even need to fight her way through some impossible barrier.
She needs to release the chains and make the decision to move.
That first movement might be tiny.
But it is movement.
And once something begins moving, it is no longer stagnant.
The black hole begins to lose its grip.
Time begins to mean something again.
Between Sloth and Diligence
Perhaps this is ultimately where the balance in the painting lies.
On one side:
Do nothing.
On the other:
Never stop doing.
Neither is freedom.
Sloth allows life to disappear through inaction.
The distorted form of Diligence allows life to be consumed through relentless obligation.
Eden sits outside both.
It is not idleness.
It is not servitude.
It is the freedom to decide what our limited time is actually for.
And I think that is what painting Sloth eventually forced me to confront.
I began with anger towards people I felt were wasting their lives.
But the painting brought me back to a much more uncomfortable place.
My own time.
Because while I can rage about what somebody else chooses to do with their life, every minute I spend consumed by their choices is another minute of mine disappearing too.
I cannot make somebody release their chains.
I cannot make somebody value their time.
I cannot force anyone towards Eden.
I can only decide what I do with my time.
And perhaps that is the choice the dove has been quietly offering all along.
Epilogue – Sloth Brings Forth My Wrath
Of all the sins I have explored, Sloth irritates something deep within me.
Perhaps it is because I struggle to understand the willingness to let life simply pass.
I can understand needing rest.
I can understand losing direction.
I can understand having periods when motivation disappears and everything feels like too much effort.
Those are human experiences.
What I find much harder to accept is making that state a permanent way of life while expecting other people to maintain it for you.
That is where my sympathy begins to disappear.
What Really Angers Me
When I began thinking about Sloth, I thought my anger was directed simply towards laziness.
It isn't.
What really bothers me is entitlement without contribution.
I have witnessed people become extraordinarily resourceful when it comes to benefiting from somebody else's effort.
And perhaps that is why this sin produces such a visceral response in me.
There are people working incredibly hard simply to survive while others seem remarkably comfortable allowing somebody else to carry them.
I find that imbalance ugly.
But there is a danger in becoming too comfortable on my own moral pedestal.
Because I am not immune from Sloth.
My Own Sloth
I procrastinate.
I waste time.
I have days when I achieve remarkably little.
I can disappear down some completely unnecessary rabbit hole and emerge wondering where several hours went.
I can put something off until tomorrow with the very best intentions of definitely doing it then.
And tomorrow I can make exactly the same promise.
So there is Sloth in me too.
Perhaps not the version I painted floating endlessly beneath the water, but enough for me to recognise the temptation.
And that matters.
These paintings aren't intended to divide the world neatly into sinners and everyone else.
We are the sinners.
Me included.
The interesting part is recognising when one of these impulses has begun taking more from us than we intended to give it.
Diligence Is in Me Too
If I'm being fair, I probably recognise myself far more readily in Diligence.
I can become completely absorbed in what I am doing.
I push myself.
I want to finish.
I want to make the next thing better.
And there is always something else that could be done.
That can become its own trap.
Because constantly doing isn't necessarily the opposite of wasting life.
Sometimes it is simply another way of allowing time to disappear.
That was one of the surprises this painting gave me.
I began convinced that Sloth was the villain and Diligence the obvious answer.
By the end, I didn't believe either extreme deserved to win.
What Is a Life For?
Perhaps that is the question underneath the entire painting.
Not:
How much did you achieve?
Not:
How little could you get away with doing?
But:
What did you do with being alive?
I don't think there is one correct answer.
A successful life doesn't have to be wealthy.
It doesn't have to be productive every minute.
It doesn't need an impressive career or a list of achievements.
And it certainly doesn't need somebody else's approval.
But I do think it needs participation.
Something that makes us reach towards the world rather than simply allowing it to pass around us.
And Still...
After all that reflection, have I suddenly developed endless patience with Sloth?
No.
It still makes my blood boil.
I still struggle enormously with people who deliberately exploit the effort, generosity or success of others rather than taking responsibility for themselves.
Perhaps I always will.
But creating this painting has made me recognise that spending too much of my own energy being furious about how somebody else chooses to waste their life would be wonderfully ironic.
I would simply be allowing their Sloth to waste my time too.
And I'm certainly not giving it that satisfaction.
So I'll leave Sloth floating in her pit.
She has her chains.
She has her choice.
And I have mine.
Sloth may bring forth my Wrath.
But it doesn't get my time.
Sloth — The Complete Journey
Sloth began as part of a much larger question—why, after more than twenty years of returning to the Seven Deadly Sins, did I still feel there was more to say?
The Seven Deadly Sins Collection is where that story begins. It explores the questions that led me to embark upon this three-year journey into sin, virtue and the uncomfortable territory between them.
The Sloth Creation Gallery takes you through the next stage. From the original sketch and first layers of paint to the development of the figures, the pit of snakes and the smallest symbolic details, you can watch Sloth take shape layer by layer and see how the painting evolved as I worked.
And here, in this Artist Journal, you've reached the deepest layer.
This is where I have taken the finished painting apart and revealed what lies behind it—my reasoning, experiences, symbolism and the questions embedded within the imagery.
The Collection tells you why the journey began.The Creation Gallery shows you how Sloth was built.The Artist Journal reveals what Sloth ultimately became.
Together, they tell the complete story.
Coming soon: watch the complete creation of Sloth in video, from the first sketch 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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