I have always loved looking at art, and not just in museums. Amazing paintings, drawings and sculptures can be found everywhere. I find I'm just as happy visiting a local art exhibition in a quiet village hall as I am at The National Gallery in London.

In 2020, Harkiran Kalsi's Black Power Fist was displayed as a billboard poster down the Peckham High Street. It strangely reminded me of a sculpture titled Not in Anger I'd seen at the Stow Shopping Centre in Harlow some years earlier. At first glance, the two works appear very different: Kalsi's being a flat, monochrome print, while the other is a three-dimensional piece cast in bronze, made a century earlier by Leon Underwood.

On the surface, these two works seem to be talking to different audience, addressing separate themes. Yet their core message is remarkably similar. Kalsi's print highlights the cause of the Black Lives Matter movement by combining the image of a raised fist inset with the words 'Black lives matter today, tomorrow, forever', with the additional words 'peace, unity, love and power' inscribed on the fingers.

Kalsi herself says, 'the words above are taken from Afrika Bambaataa's song Peace, Unity, Love and Having Fun with the last words changed to power. This is the truth of how we can create a fairer world and it is time for the power to shift, and for the voices of those oppressed to never be ignored again.'

Where Kalsi used the clenched fist as a symbol to stand against racism, Underwood used it to oppose the rise of fascism in Europe. As a student in 1911, he had been commissioned to paint a mural for the Peace Palace in The Hague. Then, at the outbreak of the First World War, he enlisted and served as a Captain in the Camouflage Section. Here, his duties involved entering No Man's Land to make accurate drawings of trees, which were then replaced with metal replicas used by military observers.

It was shortly after the end of the war that Underwood carved the original Not in Anger out of Portland stone. And just as Kalsi has 'peace' written in the heart of her work, Underwood saw his sculpture as standing for part of a greater peace movement. Michael Chase, former director of the Minories Gallery, wrote that Underwood 'dreamed of a giant anti-war memorial on the cliff-top above Dover... the fist is closed in a gesture of peace not war.'

Historically, we have often tended to view art, most especially western art, as existing in a linear narrative; in a way, it's quite reassuring to view ever-changing artistic movements through a lens of stylistic evolution, recalling how the Renaissance gave way to Mannerism, or how eighteenth-century Neoclassicism yielded to Romanticism. This approach has helped us gain fundamental insights into how social developments and fashions – as well as people, especially commissioners – have shaped art's production.

While understanding these forces can be highly informative, they are not the whole picture. Art can speak to us at a deeper level and help us connect to those things which unite us all: be it the desire to love and be loved, to grieve those we have lost, or gaze in wonder at the world around us.

So, how do we unearth the universal themes of art – the ideas which speak to our common humanity and recur throughout history?

In his 2004 book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Christopher Booker outlined seven core themes of fiction. He includes 'Rags to riches', 'The quest', 'Voyage and return' and 'Rebirth'. He aimed to find common threads that reveal why stories are written in the first place – and more importantly, why we are drawn to them. This desire – to look at art through a non-narrative lens – interests me: it seeks to bypass history and the commissioner, and more readily reveal the themes which unite us.

What categories do I propose? Like Booker, I suggest seven: 'Where heaven meets Earth'; 'Icon to portrait'; 'Power and possession'; 'The tender embrace'; 'Ecce homo'; 'The closing of the day'; and 'The eternal void'.

Where heaven meets Earth

'Where heaven meets Earth' relates to our desire to imagine there is a bridge to a world beyond our own: a more hopeful place where our troubles are left behind. Here we find the patterns and order of heaven reflected in our terrestrial realm. Examples that come to mind include Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian. In this painting, we see the god happen across Ariadne on the isle of Naxos. He instantly falls in love with her and throws her crown into the air. In doing so, Bacchus immortalises Ariadne as the constellation Corona Borealis, which is represented by the ring of stars above her.

Then there is IKB 79 by Yves Klein: one of nearly 200 blue monochrome paintings he made during his life. Klein once described how, aged 19, while lying on a beach, he experienced a mental journey into the blue depths and declared, 'I have written my name on the far side of the sky!'

We might also think of Donati's Comet by James Poole, Starfield – Blackthorn by Susan Derges and Back to the Garden by Diane Ibbotson.

Icon to portrait

Early portraiture had its roots in various ancient cultures, though Christian icon painting greatly influenced the genre.

The story goes that when Jesus carried his cross to Calvary, a woman named Veronica took pity on him. In her compassion, she offered a linen handkerchief to Christ so he could wipe the sweat trickling from his brow. When he returned it, Veronica saw an impression of Jesus's face permanently imprinted.

Saint Veronica with the Sudarium captures the story beautifully and illustrates the tale which inspired monks to paint icons. Gradually, the monks expanded their repertoire to include other saints. And by the time of the Renaissance, popes, the aristocracy and the elite wanted their likenesses captured by artists too. We see a particularly fine example in Doge Leonardo Loredan by Giovanni Bellini.

Paintings like Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Artemisia Gentileschi and 1974 – painted over 350 years later by Lubaina Himid – demonstrate just how universal and endlessly fascinating we find images of the human face.

Power and possession

Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano

This theme highlights our social and political struggles and what we ultimately gain as a result of them. We see this theme in images of war, such as The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello and even in Whaam! by Roy Lichtenstein. We also recall Kalsi's Black Power Fist and Underwood's Not in Anger, which represent our endless desire to fight for a better future.

The 'better future', once won, is also celebrated in art. In Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews, we see it as a show of soft power, with the Andrews presenting their status and wealth – the land they own stretched out behind them.

The tender embrace

The Madonna of the Pinks ('La Madonna dei Garofani')

'The tender embrace' encompasses adult love and the love of a parent for their child: a universal theme that requires little by way of explanation.

It is only for us to enjoy paintings such as The Madonna of the Pinks by Raphael, The Kiss by Auguste Rodin, Melanie and Me Swimming by Michael Andrews and Mother and Child by Claudia Williams.

Ecce homo

This is the subject of human suffering and represents a major concept in the canon of art. It is an expression of individual pain. This theme emerged early in western art within paintings of the crucifixion of Jesus and images of the body of Christ after the flagellation.

We also find it in contemporary paintings such as Crucifixion by Emmanuel Levy. Here we see how Levy has appropriated the image of the crucifixion as a symbol for the suffering of all Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Other works of this theme include Hercules and Antaeus by Lucas Cranach the elder, The Death of the Virgin by Paula Rego, A Girl in the London Asylum by Amadeo John Engel Terzi and DSW I by David Sullivan.

A Girl in the London Asylum Suffering from Chronic Pellagra

The closing of the day

'The closing of the day' represents the opposite of suffering, where we contemplate before the calm of sleep. Our labour is done and we can finally rest.

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838

Let us look at examples in The Sleeping Couple by Jan Steen, The Fighting Temeraire by J. M. W. Turner, Tree Shadows on the Park Wall, Roundhay, Leeds by John Atkinson Grimshaw.

It can also show up in works set during a calm moment at any time of the day, like Bathers at Asnières by Georges Seurat and The Seated Woman by Gwen John. These paintings capture a quiet moment of pause.

The eternal void

'The eternal void' is our final subject. It symbolises the great unknowingness of what lies beyond death and our lives here on earth. Pain is at an end, and for those left behind, we are a lingering memory.

Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, erected in the grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire by the late Sir George Beaumont, Bt.

This theme is encapsulated in works like Ophelia by John Everett Millais and Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds by John Constable.

Contemporary works which speak to a sense of darkness or foreboding include Red on Maroon by Mark Rothko, Saint Peter's Gate by an anonymous artist and Stern by Marlene Dumas.

While many works of art fit easily under one heading, plenty can effortlessly find a home in two or more categories. The aim here is not to be rigid, but instead to offer a guide to where any given work of art might most comfortably sit. You may think of many more themes, or fewer. From looking at art through universal concepts, hopefully, we can gain an insight into what underpins these works and how they relate to us all.

Robert Priseman, artist, collector, writer, curator and publisher