MEMENTO MORI
MEMENTO MORI -graphite drawing on paper - 70 x 50 cm - 27½ x 19½ Inches - 2020
THE SKULL is quite obvious with the title, but consider the sharp teeth - is it the skull of a defeated vampire? THE PORTRAIT is curious too: I first drew it a couple of years ago as a sketch in the guestbook of PIGMALION 2017, called Inward Directed Optic. It was supposed to represent the Inner Universe, a concept that goes back to reading an essay of Alfred Kubin about 'The Other Side', or as I called it, my personal 'Bogomil's Universe'. THE FETUS is the Alpha of Life that starts the cycle, which ends with the skull, the Omega. In between that cycle, you have THE THREE NORNS which I tongue-in-cheek depicted as 3 female tailor mannequins, perhaps a bit of a stretch playing on the myth of spinning the threads of life. And in the background you see ANUBIS, the Egyptian god of death and the afterlife. There is more to discover in the details, and much of it was created through a sort of automatism, more in tune with surrealist concepts of accessing the subconscious (see above, about Alfred Kubin). My work is attributable to the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, a post-surrealist movement in Austria.
My eldest son used this image as a cover for his tune on SoundCloud:
Prints available here:
