Positioning Print

The painting technique refers to the painting of the old Flemish masters. The picture is painted with the world's best single-pigment, natural oil paints. I was inspired to paint this picture by a scientific work on the eternal conflict between the sacred and the profane: "In primitive cultures, as well as in many myths about a state that preceded culture, the body played a significant role. It was not artificially separated from the soul or mind - the human existed as a somatopsychic unity. Biological needs or sensual instincts were not deprecated; constituting an indispensable part of nature, they were in harmony with the spiritual sphere. What was not subject to sensory experience was abstraction. Nevertheless, with the development of civilization, man gradually began to distinguish himself (as the creator of culture and a higher, thinking being) from the background of nature. Over time, by becoming more and more opposed to it, he created a disconnect between the body and the mind. This dualistic split, which makes the sense of an individual's inner split the only way of seeing the world, has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy [...] This concept leads in a direct line to the dualistic philosophy of Descartes, questioning sensory cognition and the reality of the world, and considering reason as ontological certainty. The mind is a transcendent gift of God, while the body is only an unreliable "machine" - only thought processes allow a person to believe in his own existence, and not, as it might seem, the ability to perceive the world through the senses." PARADOXES OF BODY Magdalena Kempna-Pieniążek, Barbara Surmacz-Dobrowolska.