The Seven Deadly Sins: Reading the Stories Behind the Art

Twenty Years Exploring the Seven Deadly Sins

A Journey Through Human Nature

For more than twenty years, I have kept returning to the same seven words:

Pride. Envy. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. Sloth. Wrath.

Why?

Because I don't really see them as ancient religious ideas belonging to another age.

I see them everywhere.

I see them in politics and power. In advertising and consumerism. In families and relationships. In the way we present ourselves to the world and, perhaps more importantly, in the things we don't always like admitting about ourselves.

I see them in me.

That is what has kept me fascinated by the Seven Deadly Sins for so long.

I am a deep thinker by nature. I constantly question why people behave as they do. What makes someone want more when they already have enough? Why can another person's success make us feel diminished? Why do we knowingly cross boundaries? Why do we waste time when we know how precious it is? And how does ordinary anger become something capable of consuming us?

The more I have explored these questions, the less interested I have become in simply labelling behaviour as good or bad.

Human beings are far more complicated than that.

Pride can grow from achievement.

Envy can become ambition.

Desire is part of being alive.

Rest is necessary.

Anger can begin with genuine injustice.

Wanting a comfortable life does not make someone greedy, and enjoying food, wine or beautiful things doesn't automatically make someone gluttonous.

So where is the line?

At what point does an ordinary human impulse become something destructive?

That question sits at the heart of this collection.

And then there are the Seven Heavenly Virtues.

At first, pairing each sin with its opposing virtue seemed straightforward. Surely virtue would represent the good and sin the bad?

But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I became.

Can Kindness suffocate?

Can Charity become performance?

Can Diligence become exploitation?

Can Chastity merely imprison desire?

Can Patience be pushed until it finally breaks?

Suddenly the virtues became every bit as interesting as the sins.

So these paintings are not sermons.

I am not standing outside humanity pointing a finger at everybody else.

I am a sinner too.

Some of these sins I recognise strongly within myself. Others I have experienced through the behaviour of people around me. Some make me laugh at myself. Some make me question myself.

And some make me furious.

But all seven have forced me to look.

That is really what this collection is about.

Looking.

At ourselves.

At each other.

At the systems we've created.

At the choices we make.

And at that uncomfortable space between the person we believe ourselves to be and the person our actions sometimes reveal.

The Journey to These Seven Paintings

These paintings did not appear from nowhere.

My fascination with the Seven Deadly Sins has followed me through several very different bodies of work over the past twenty years.

It began with The House of Sin and The House of Virtue, two companion paintings in which the sins and virtues occupied opposing worlds. Sin was rich, seductive and lavish; virtue colder and more austere. Even then, I was beginning to question whether good and bad could ever be separated quite as neatly as we would like.

Then came The Carnival of Sin, where I turned the seven sins into a grotesque fairground spectacle. Lust became the fortune teller, Greed the ringmaster, and the remaining sins took their places within a carnival assembled like a giant jigsaw.

My exploration later took me into Dante's Inferno. This time I stepped back from my own interpretation and concentrated on bringing Dante's extraordinary vision of Hell into sculptural form.

And then I allowed myself to have a little fun with them.

Sinful Fairies transformed the sins into seven watercolour characters—lighter, more whimsical and mischievous, but still carrying the personality of their respective sins.

Each collection took me somewhere different.

But I wasn't finished.

I wanted to return to the Seven Deadly Sins one more time and give them everything I had learned—not just artistically, but through twenty more years of observing people, questioning society and examining myself.

That became this collection.

And I believe these are the most accomplished works I have created on the subject.

Then I would completely replace the current long sin sections with short introductions like these:

Pride

Pride asks us to look at ourselves—but perhaps more importantly, to ask why we need everybody else to look too.

There is healthy pride in achievement, and then there is the ego that needs admiration, status and validation to survive.

Of all the sins, Pride feels particularly comfortable in the modern world. We can curate ourselves, advertise ourselves and measure approval almost instantly.

But where does confidence end and ego begin?

And what happens when Humility—the virtue intended to oppose Pride—becomes another performance designed to attract attention?

Pride was where I began asking whether the sin and its virtue might actually be wearing different versions of the same mask.

Enter the Pride journal to discover the complete painting and its symbolism.

Envy

Envy looks sideways.

It sees what somebody else has and asks:

Why don't I have that?

But I don't believe Envy is always destructive.

I have felt envy become fuel—the recognition of something I want encouraging me to work harder towards achieving it myself.

The darkness begins when admiration becomes resentment.

When I want that too becomes I don't want you to have it.

That transformation fascinated me.

And when I placed Kindness opposite Envy, I discovered something even more sinister: kindness itself can become a means of control.

So is Envy always poison—or does the real danger lie in what we choose to do with it?

Enter the Envy journal to discover the complete story.

Greed

Greed leaves me with one enormous question:

When is enough, enough?

I understand wanting comfort.

I understand enjoying beautiful things.

I understand wanting financial security and being rewarded for hard work.

What I struggle to understand is accumulation without an end point.

Another house.

Another car.

Another million.

Another possession simply because it can be possessed.

And then I began looking at Charity.

If giving becomes a performance used to justify excessive taking, is it still virtuous?

Greed made me question not whether we should have things, but when having becomes the thing that has us.

Enter the Greed journal to explore the painting.

Gluttony

This one makes me squirm slightly because I recognise it in myself.

Gluttony is my go on, have another one sin.

Another chocolate.

Another glass.

Another little reward.

But while creating this painting, my own excess became part of a much larger question.

What happens when an entire society develops the same appetite?

Food.

Fuel.

Technology.

Resources.

Possessions.

More.

Always more.

And opposite that appetite sits Temperance—supposedly the answer—until restraint itself becomes another form of destruction.

Perhaps Gluttony isn't really about how much we consume at all. Perhaps it is about losing the ability to recognise when we have enough.

Enter the Gluttony journal to discover more.

Lust

Lust is the sin I find most difficult to look at dispassionately.

I have observed its destructive force and experienced the consequences it can leave behind.

But this painting forced me to look beyond sexual desire.

What if Lust is simply desire that has stopped respecting boundaries?

The lust for another person.

Recognition.

Control.

Power.

What happens when I want becomes more important than what will this do to somebody else?

And then there is Chastity.

Is Chastity the absence of Lust—or merely Lust restrained?

This is one of the darkest paintings in the collection, and its journal goes into places the collection page deliberately does not.

The question at its centre is remarkably simple: desire exists, but do we act upon it?

Enter the Lust journal to explore the complete story.

Sloth

I'll admit this one immediately:

Sloth makes my blood boil.

But while creating the painting, I realised my anger wasn't really about having a lazy day.

We all need those.

I was interested in something deeper—the deliberate withdrawal from participation in your own life and the expectation that somebody else will carry what you refuse to carry yourself.

Then I looked at Diligence.

Surely hard work must be the answer?

Not necessarily.

Because the person willing to carry everything can become extremely useful to those willing to let them.

Suddenly I had two extremes.

One gives nothing. The other can be expected to give everything.

And between them is the only thing any of us truly owns for a limited period:

time.

Enter the Sloth journal to discover where that time goes.

Wrath

And finally:

Wrath.

Not anger.

Wrath.

I see a difference between the two.

Anger can erupt and disappear. Wrath collects things.

A slight.

An insult.

A betrayal.

An injustice.

Another wound.

Another.

Until eventually something breaks.

This is a sin I have looked deeply into because I wanted to understand where that explosion actually begins.

And opposite Wrath stands Patience.

But how long can Patience remain patient?

What happens when we keep asking someone to absorb one more hurt, tolerate one more injustice and remain calm for just a little longer?

Perhaps Wrath isn't born at the moment of explosion at all. Perhaps we need to look much further back.

Enter the Wrath journal to discover where I believe it begins.

Before You Leave — Look Again

Art creates conversations. It encourages us to question, challenges what we think we know and, sometimes, makes us uncomfortable.

That is one of the reasons I have begun writing these journals in much greater depth.

Every artwork has a story.

It might be hidden in a colour, an object, a gesture, a material, a tiny symbol in the corner of a canvas or simply in the reason the artist needed to make the work in the first place. We don't always see that story on our first encounter with an artwork.

It is very easy to stand in front of something and say:

“I don't like that.”

And that's absolutely fine.

You don't have to like my work.

In fact, whether you like what I have produced is almost irrelevant to what I hope these journals might achieve.

What I would love is for them to encourage you to look again.

Read behind the image.

Ask why something is there.

Question the colour.

Notice the composition.

Look for the symbolism.

Think about what the artist might be trying to communicate before deciding what the work means to you.

You may still dislike it afterwards.

But now you know why.

And that is a completely different relationship with art.

My Art Isn't Always Comfortable

I know my own work can be uncomfortable.

Sometimes it is uncomfortable to look at.

Sometimes the story behind it is even more uncomfortable to read.

I don't create everything to be beautiful or agreeable. I create because I have something I want to explore, question or say.

You might disagree with me completely.

You might see something I never intended.

You might recognise a little piece of yourself somewhere within one of these sinners and think, Oh dear... that's me.

Or a painting you initially disliked might suddenly make sense once you understand why it exists.

That moment interests me far more than whether somebody simply tells me they like my painting.

These Journals Are About More Than My Art

There is another reason I want to write them.

I want people to become more curious about art itself.

Not just mine.

If reading about the strange little details buried inside one of my paintings encourages you to look more closely the next time you encounter another artist's work, then these journals have achieved something worthwhile.

Ask questions of their work too.

Why did they make it?

Why that material?

Why those colours?

What were they experiencing?

What are they trying to tell us?

What have they hidden that we haven't noticed yet?

Artists put extraordinary amounts of themselves into what they create, and sometimes a work that can be dismissed in seconds has taken months or years of thought, experimentation, failure, emotion and labour to reach that wall.

So I want these blogs to celebrate artists, not simply promote me.

There are countless voices, styles and ways of seeing the world, and we don't have to like all of them to recognise their value.

The more we learn to read art, the wider our visual language becomes.

And perhaps the next time you find yourself standing in front of something thinking, “I don't like that,” another little voice might follow:

“But why did they make it?”

That's where the conversation begins.

Whether you agree with my interpretations, challenge them completely or simply leave seeing art a little differently, I am happy.

My paintings tell my stories.

Other artists tell theirs.

And you bring your own experiences to everything you see.

Somewhere between those three things, art comes alive.

After all, art was never meant simply to match the sofa.

And as for this particular collection...

We are all sinners.

If you share my slightly mischievous sense of humour, you can also embrace yours. Pop over to the shop, choose an Own Your Sin T-shirt and wear your favourite deadly sin with pride...

Perhaps not too much Pride.

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