AfterThoughts
Questions like 'What is life and how should I live it?', 'Who am I at my core, with all my thoughts and concerns?' and 'How should I look at the world where I am standing?' have become more prominent in my mind. I want to find meaning because more often I feel uncertain about how to approach my life. Honestly, I was never a reader, so this current behavior most likely explains where I am at right now.
















Sketch drawings, acrylic & oil pastel on paper
Last December, I picked up John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and it made more vivid the vague questions in my head. Even though it was published back in 1859, everything he wrote about individuality, freedom, the need for diverse environments, human growth, and the dangers of the tyranny of the majority caused a shift inside me.
These concepts might seem obvious today, but reading them felt like a fist knocking on the doors of the society I inhabit, the environment that shaped me, and the mindset I always held. It created a fascination with philosophy. Since then, I read Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and the writings of Zhuangzi. My list of books to read next is simply increasing.
The emotional impact of these passages led to abstract visualization and music composition. On Liberty was the starting point where art and philosophy met for me. Examining these philosophical messages, thinking about them, and discussing them is no longer just about finding inspiration or material for my art. This process is simply becoming an essential part of how I live.

"Where, not the person’s own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress."

"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."

"Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves — what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or What would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? (...)"

"Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and avoid the latter. (...) But neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it. (...)"

"He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument; but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. (...)"
Each sketch is inspired by the passage from the book, John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

Paintings work in progress in the studio