"Social Identity" Painting

I am a Fine Art graduate based in London. Primarily I paint portraits which are somewhat simplified in terms of detail. Simplification and categorization is something that as human beings is engrained within us. We cannot just be people. Instead we have to place one another within a different race, nationality, emotion, language, belief, religion, state of wealth and so on. Categorization and separation is almost infinite for us. Its how we are educated and without it we would not be where we are today. ‘Past behaviour is the best predictor for future behaviour’. I believe that this habit to consistently categorize makes us predictable. If you could scrape together the entire history of human beings and sculpt it into one person, you would be left with every emotion that a human has ever felt, which gives us a blurred view of the future. Although so much pain is caused directly as a result of this consistent individualization, war and terrorism for example, I have always thought that there is also beauty in our need to categorise. This ability is also built within the way we see. We see different colours and tones, line and shapes which from a distance look highly complex but upon closer inspection you begin to see a collaboration, with one colour simply sitting beside another. Much like the generality of human beings, upon closer inspection, everything that once seemed built up to complexity, becomes simple and comprehendible.