From Philosophy to Paint: Building The Veiled Court
- Tasnim Ismail
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
Article by Tasnim Ismail
I hold a PhD in Philosophy from University College London, specialising in existentialism, phenomenology and feminist thought. For years, my days were spent reading Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, thinking and writing about what it means to become ourselves within the structures we inherit. My world was built from argument and analysis.
Somewhere in the middle of my research, I realised language alone couldn't hold everything I was trying to think.
So I picked up a paintbrush.
Painting wasn't a departure from philosophy. It became another way of doing it. The questions remained the same: how do we negotiate the limits placed upon us? What does it mean to take what is given to us and make it our own? Instead of arguments and footnotes, I began thinking through colour, composition and symbol. Where philosophy demanded clarity, painting allowed ambiguity. Meaning emerged slowly through layers of colour rather than lines of argument.
The Flesh: Learning to Trust the Process
My earliest body of work, The Flesh, marked a complete shift in how I worked. Rather than planning compositions or working from detailed studies, I painted instinctively, allowing each brushstroke to suggest the next. Figures slowly emerged from layers of colour without my fully knowing where they were going.
After years of academic precision, that freedom felt almost radical.
I became fascinated by the body, not as something observed from the outside, but as something lived from within. The paintings weren't attempts at realism; they were attempts to capture the strange experience of inhabiting a body at all. That series taught me something I still carry into every painting: making art can be a form of thinking in its own right. It doesn't illustrate ideas - it discovers them.
Neon Arcana: Twenty-Two Paintings in Three Weeks
Towards the end of my doctorate, I encountered tarot for the first time. I wasn't drawn to divination so much as the visual language of the Major Arcana. Each card seemed capable of condensing an entire psychological state into a single image.
I painted Neon Arcana in a three-week burst of intuition: twenty-two acrylic paintings, each just five by seven inches, reimagining the Major Arcana as vivid contemporary icons. Every figure sat against an intense colour field representing a psychological state, framed by intricate gold ornament that radiated like electrical current.
There was no narrative connecting the paintings. They existed as individual moments - immediate, symbolic and emotionally charged.
The series was exhibited in two South London galleries, Corner Gallery and À L'Étage 2. Seeing strangers stop in front of paintings that had existed only in my imagination changed the way I thought about making art. Yet even then, I knew I hadn't reached the work I ultimately wanted to make.
The Veiled Court: Painting Philosophy
That work became The Veiled Court, the series I am currently developing.
Like Neon Arcana, it reimagines the twenty-two Major Arcana, but the way I approach the paintings has transformed. The paintings are larger, slower and far more considered. Each composition begins with extensive research and planning before I ever touch the canvas. I spend weeks developing symbolic architecture, colour palettes and compositional plans. Yet once painting begins, the work almost always leads me somewhere I hadn't anticipated. Meanings emerge that I hadn't consciously planned, and the paintings become conversations rather than illustrations.
The Veiled Court unfolds across three acts - self-establishment, crisis and transformation - within a symbolic palace where each figure inhabits a distinct psychological and architectural space. As the series progresses, the palace itself begins to change alongside its inhabitants, shifting from stability towards fragmentation before slowly reconstructing itself.
Certain visual motifs quietly evolve throughout the series. Gold becomes a recurring marker of performed identity, moving from ordered ornament into disruption before returning in a transformed state. Drapery shifts from rigid structure to something increasingly fluid, reflecting changing relationships between the figures and themselves. The architecture becomes less certain. Thresholds, staircases and arches appear again and again because I have come to think of identity as something that exists not in fixed places, but in moments of transition.
Looking back, moving from philosophy into art was never really a change of direction. I wasn't abandoning one practice for another; I was simply changing languages.
The Veiled Court is the work I feel I've been moving towards all along. It is the most ambitious project I have undertaken, and with every painting it asks more of me - technically, intellectually and emotionally.
For years I believed that philosophy was where I asked my deepest questions. Now I think I was simply learning one language before discovering another.
Website: www.tazzymoon.com
Social Media: @tazzy_moon
