Daniel O'Sullivan
JUSTICE. Oil 60X50”
When I began Justice, I wondered if I should keep the blue background color. As I reflected on this, I realized that the background color could be used to interrelate the Virtues. Blue as a spiritual color could identify the Virtues that perfect the higher faculties of understanding and will. Red, with its carnal overtones, could be used for the Virtues that dispose the sentient and emotional life. So Justice and Prudence would be related through the background color.
How, then, differentiate between them? It occurred to me to change the direction of the light. This could set up a counterpoint. It would pair the Virtues of receptive understanding and sensing with light from the left, and Virtues for the appetites of desire and will with light from the right. Left and right in a painting are not neutral equivalents for a Westerner. The flow is from left to right. The eye starts looking from the left, and an object is psychologically prior to something on its right. So light from the left seems to press the objects on their quiet shadows, while light from the right draws the objects away from their active shadows.
I began the painting of Justice by establishing the positions of the three rectangles. The rival vice of Anger, which dominates many who despair of Justice, appears as a lion on the carbon paper. Overlapping this is a tracing of Fraud, the masked figure with a fan. The third rectangle should be made by the canvas stretchers, but they aren’t straight. This seemed a good way of adverting to the notion that Justice has to do with what is owed, with what ought to be. Lady Fraud, the weak vice, resembles the face on the statue of Themis, the Titan guardian of Order, and the exposed canvas disquietingly joins them.
“On the level” should mean honest and forthright. But the law book props up the level so it is parallel to Fraud, and the scholar’s magnifying glass perversely hides the true reading. The balance beam lies on the same plane. The objects on it ask, “Is Justice only fashionable preference? Can it justify itself like a scale that can weigh itself?” The fulcrum of the balance is a golden prism inscribed with the Enlightenment motto “Novus Ordo Seclorum.” It crowns the ladder’s ascent from the darkness. I put in the Masonic apron to hint at an occult aspect to the Prometheanism of the Enlightenment.
I wanted to reinforce the way the prism echoes the tilting rectangles, so I represented Bias with a large white cone. This is the strong vice, concerned only with vindicating its own interests. The eye holes make the cone resemble the headpiece of an inquisitor or Klansman. The plumb line can remind us that we are under a transcendent measure.