Daniel O'Sullivan
COURAGE. Oil 60X50”
The tracing paper bears an image of Heracles wearing the lion’s skin, but you can also read him as emerging from the lion’s jaws. Courage, also called Fortitude, is about dealing with the fear of death and its surrogates—pain, loss, ridicule. In this context there is the resonant notion that the drawing of Heracles has to pass through the darkness of the carbon paper to register on the surface and become actual. Images of victory, the banner and palms, overlay the two rectangles. The third rectangle becomes a toy theater. It frames the little manikin in his stage fright. To represent Courage, I chose a trumpet, which summons us in our fear. The strong vice of Cruelty, where you identify with what you fear, wraps itself like a whip around the scythe and the boot. Sexual fear is linked to Cruelty as is Lust, the rival vice. I pictured Lust as an archaic image of a wild boar, fleeing on a hidden field. I thought the exposed area in Justice could be repeated to good effect. Finally, the timorous hare looks back at the scene he too is fleeing.
TEMPERANCE. Oil 60X50”
The classical motif is a consistent theme in this series. In this painting, the myth of Actaeon underlies much of the imagery. I think some lines of Eliot prompted me to see the connection between this myth and the notion of personal disorder that Temperance, the leash, tries to address. Actaeon, a hunter on an aimless stroll, happens upon the forbidden precincts of the goddess Diana’s bath. She curses him for his violation and turns him into a stag to be torn apart by his own hounds. Almost every object is broken in this scene except the dog because our missing integrity, the source of our decay, comes from a fissure in our spirit, not from our animal nature. The broken statue symbolizes the weak vice of Laxness. Addiction, the strong vice, is indeed a vicious cycle. I used a charred wheel like Ixion’s to represent it. The wheel with its twelve spokes resembles the top view of a twelve-step spiral staircase, whose side view is inscribed on the brown paper folded over the bench. The AA book emphasizes this notion of spiritual recovery. The theme of the three rectangles returns. The tracing of chaste Diana, her bow broken, is torn across, and one half is trying to devour its counterpart—an enacted image of Gluttony. The third rectangle, the palette, is like the interface between our natures: The paint on the wood becomes the blood of the myth.