It’s a rare opportunity to actually do something with art.
Art’s a strange profession; no one can use, eat, or shelter themselves with the stuff. Art can’t feed the body (well, maybe it can, if it’s a banana), but it can feed the mind and the soul. It communicates, affecting us in various ways. My work aims to foster thought and insight by revealing connections I have seen between the broad themes of life, society, nature, science, and history. These connections reveal the myriad things people have in common that should unite us in a pan-human fellowship, but don’t because our nature is to focus on irritants and problems to the exclusion of a smoothly functioning background. Unfortunately irritants and problems drive advertising and clicks which further drive algorithms to curate our information into ever more exclusionary loops. We lose the big picture as our attention is tightly focussed on things that drive us mad, literally. Problems polarize us. They fragment a cohesive society into tribes in conflict. Yet our common connections remain and can be restored. Because of its universal nature art can play a role.
One strength of art is that it functions as a wide-angle lens. The phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” describes the ability of art to convey complex meaning in a glance. The tight focus that politics, advertising, and algorithms use to pull people into narratives and tribal interest groups is undone by effective art. The simplicity of memes can drive a tightly narrated storyline, but a good play or a painting (like Guernica) says more and can be revelatory. Art can do heavy lifting in the realm of ideas.
This is my aim as an artist: to take that wide-angle lens to deep universal themes, to find what humans share in common, and then present ideas (including highly contentious ones) for calm collegial conversation. The Last Supper does this well. It grapples with the sacred and the profane; the global structure of power (with its implications), and the choice we all have for redemption in the light of mercy. These are issues that span time and space and they can spark insight when considered.
The Last Supper is rich with symbolism and commands attention due to its scale and visual complexity. The feast of portraits of well-known figures within elicits memories of recent events and the emotions that accompanied them. It is peppered with familiar objects that suggest a different interpretation to each viewer.
It is a painting that ‘performs’ the work it was designed for; to get people thinking.
It is also lending its value to a cause. Mika Vauhkala sued the Finnish government for abusing his rights to free movement and to bodily autonomy. These are essential rights and Mika’s is fighting an important case. If a citizen is the basic political unit of authority (the social contract) their rights are the very bedrock of a society and are sacrosanct; governments may not overstep the limitations of their power when dealing with the citizen, or democracy will erode into autocracy or further into tyranny. Mika’s legal fight is our fight.
Finnish law forbids class action lawsuits, so Mika is forced to face the colossus of the state by himself. It’s the definition of a ‘David vs Goliath’ contest. Goliath has done two things in an effort to bring Mika to his knees; one is to squander his resources on fruitless and expensive hearings where the court throws his suit out without a defensible basis, and the other is to deplete his resources by levying heavy fines and charging him for the state’s legal fees. To date, his liabilities are approaching €200,000.
Mika’s last hope is to bring his case outside of Finland to the European Court Of Human Rights in Strasbourg where he has a better chance at a fair hearing. He needs funding to sustain his efforts in hopes for a win or to pay the Finnish government should he lose this final appeal.
Mika had the idea to raise money through an art auction and I have offered The Last Supper to help him do so. Mika’s story fits well with the message of The Last Supper. Both address the relationship of people to power and the basic idea that each human life is sovereign with inviolable rights. Physically The Last Supper is large – over 3 meters in length. It is a skillfully executed masterwork suitable for a museum and its floor price at auction reflects this. If sold, The Last Supper by itself will restore Mika to solvency.
The auction is online here through the month of March. Serious art collectors who may want to acquire The Last Supper may do an in-depth exploration of it here. Signed archival prints of The Last Supper are available to purchase in addition to smaller works that I have offered up for Mika to sell here.
Mika will also get a 30% commission for any portraits ordered from his website. Here is one I painted of him in February…
and more examples of my portraits can be found here.
Please share Mika’s story and let art-loving friends know about the auction.
Here’s the poem for The Last Supper
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
The Last Supper...
Is about the ultimate consumerism.
It is about scarcity and excess.
It is about human failure and the possibility of redemption.
It is about the technocrats running the show.
It is a feast of choices, options and decisions.
It is about the precious world we are wasting.
It is an homage to the mystery and the divine.
It is a message on gambling and risk-taking.
It is a table of uncultured sophisticrats.
It is the alpha and the omega with a killer on the left and a shooter on the right.
It is missing the main guest and includes the traitor, the thirteenth diner, screaming.
It quietly reminds you that you are a thinking and sovereign being.
It refers to the urgency of the now...
of the human condition and, how...
if we do nothing to alter our trajectory...
we may each be having our own last supper...
In the not too distant future.Copyright Mark Hopkins March 05, 2026
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