Week 19. "A Second Fool" 18"x24" oil on canvas

If I were the plaything of every thought, I would be a fool, not a wise man.
~Rumi

A Second Fool is, as the name implies, is a second piece following One Fool which was posted to this blog a couple of weeks ago. Both of these painting have been were started by referring to a photo I took of myself. I manipulated the photo in Photoshop so that the face barely resembled my own then used this manipulated image. In essence both paintings are self portraits but not intended to look like me. Anyone who knows me would not describe me as a dark skinned man with a red afro and one blue eye and one brown. But that's the whole point. A fool thinks he is wise. He is absolutely sure that he knows who he is. He knows his face, name, race, nationality, social security number, religion, schools graduated from, net worth, etc... A wise man knows himself to be a fool because, although he knows all of those things also, he recognizes that not one of them actually have anything to do with who he is. He knows that a perpetually open and unassuming mind is the only mind that can be filled with wisdom even though it may make him look a fool. I've had occasional dreams where within the dream I glance into a mirror and the face staring back looks nothing like me. I always awake with a start when this happens. And yet, if the face in the mirror looks like black man with a red afro, or if he looks twenty, or forty, or even if it's a woman's face looking back at me, I am still me. The superficial is exactly that, superficial. Freedom is recognizing that which is insignificant and letting it go. Poof!

Let no man deceive himself.
If any man among you seemeth to
be wise in this world, let him be-
come a fool, that he may be wise. 1 Corinthians 3:18

Before One Fool and A Second Fool I'd explored the idea in a couple of other paintings. One is from quite a long time ago and was inspired directly by The Fool card from the Tarot (on the left). I was never totally happy with it and stopped working on it before it was finished. The air around the fool is filled with images and faces that can be made out if looked at closely. The more recent painting is called Jumper and was one of the pieces that was shown in Art for Progress's Clash of the Artists 2009 show in New York city.