...

> Inevitable

🐚
For as long as I can remember, I was afraid of skulls. I hated to look at them, or think about them. It was more serious than you are imagining.

I am also quite seriously afraid of death, even if I make jokes about it. It is something I think about with a frequency that would make a 17th century poet uncomfortable. One morning I awoke in the dead of night, and I was so afraid of death that I thought it might drown me. I could see myself aging and withering in my mind's eye, I could see my frantic dying thoughts evaporating in my skull, tongue too heavy to say the words. And so I did what I always do when I cannot do anything else: I painted. I painted for five minutes and thirty four minutes without stopping, and when I was done I had the painting you are looking at, and I went to sleep.

Skulls have not troubled me since that day.

The Hylozoist is a long-form digital project I began in February 2020. Each painting tells a story, and each painting tells another story when viewed in context. Also, each painting can be followed to the next painting in the series if you follow the most interesting thing in the scene.

To see more paintings from the project, click here.