"The Family Business" a painting by Amelia Alcock-White

http://www.ameliawhite.net/3-6.html

Comments by Amelia Alcock-White:
Scientifically speaking, Scorpions are cold-blooded, opportunistic predators. Here we see a façade of forthrightness and generosity, supposedly driven by esoteric religious conviction. Behind the guise of evangelist in designer attire we discover a conscienceless, sociopath, both carrying and being driven forward by his family.

The woman with the whip represents his mother who initially condoned and later excused his increasingly socially unacceptable behavior. After years of defending her son she has begun to believe the lies she has taught him to disseminate, seeing him as both hero and victim and urging him on, unable to face his failure as a man or hers as a mother.

Of the ‘children’ pictured, one is a baby, tightly grasped by the controlling grandmother; one is a young man looking over grandmother’s shoulder at his father. However well-intentioned, he is too brainwashed to realize the extent of wrong doings, too naive to see his own complicity and too weak to accept responsibility. The monkey represents both ‘monkey-see, monkey-do’ and stunned and de-evolved complacency, symbolizing others that are being dragged ‘along for the ride’.

The sinfully corrupt practices of the puppet father, whose strings are pulled by his mother, have karmically bankrupted an entire family, permeating every aspect of their lives. The blood of the ‘Family Business’ is on everyone’s hands; the young, the unwilling and the innocent alike.