Death and Life

All the philosophy, science, discoveries and inventions around us began from life. And how does one define life, until death. And in that case, what is death? Bidding goodbye to being a participant and becoming the observer.

Tod und Leben. Death and Life. The colourful right side of the painting is what I first assume to be life, and to the left, a darker, more gloomy picturisation of a skeleton I assume is death — simply because the right side bears little patches of colourful elements of the earth in it. A flower, a field, a monkey, a baby. The left side bears dominantly only the symbol of the cross.

While death has only one skeleton gawking at life, life has many participants, one holding the other. I see a transition from a woman holding a baby to a muscular man holding another woman — from pleasure and bliss to pain and agony. The ones at the top are happy about the birth; the ones at the bottom mourn the dead on the left. I also see an evolution buried under the zest of this nest of life — a monkey, buried under the weight of human beings.

But I am questioning my pre-conceived thought that what is to the left is death and what is to the right is life. Why not the other way round? I see the image of death here resembling Pope Innocent X — a skeleton wrapped in cross. And I see a woman at the edge of everything, looking at what life had once offered her. The dead and gone past.

What if the skeleton is a woman who sacrificed her life in the name of God, in the very prime of her beauty? I arrive at this because there are only two subjects in this painting with their eyes open- a young girl and the skeleton. The girl is drowned in her own beauty, unaware that she is being gawked at by a skeleton. The eyes of the skeleton convey disbelief, jealousy, regret for what she gave up, and pride for what she chose instead.

The right side is a blooming tree. An eternal cycle. A baby, a girl, a woman holding a baby, an old woman, a woman in a man's arms. The background was particularly changed in this version from gold to a murky green-grey, room enough for the contrast to speak for itself — green for life and grey for death, and how both are intertwined and cannot be juxtaposed the way a painting pretends to.

Life and death is all about how we perceive our choices. It is also about the eternal cycle, despite individual choices. This brings to mind the idea — often attributed to Plato — that life is a burden and death is freedom: the physical body trapping the soul in endless desire, pain and confusion, and death as the permanent separation of soul from body. Free of the body's noise, the soul finally experiences the unhindered liberation of being "self".