What You Are, I Once Was; What I Am, You Will Be

Through this series of oil paintings, I share my reactions and contemplations on death and impermanence. When I was a kid, my family was driving down a dark highway when they told me we were all going to die. That night I was heartbroken but also curious of the vastness of a universe that would carry on without me. These thoughts have resonated with me lately due to a series of guided Buddhist contemplations I started upon arriving in Florence. These meditations force me to recognize the impermanence and unreliability of all things, including my own body. They make me consider the suffering of all forms of life.

I chose roadkill as my subject matter to symbolize thoughts that arise from these contemplations. Each painting features roadkill I have seen in my life and utilizes gloomy tonal harmonies and rough brush strokes to convey what they showed me. The sight of roadkill elicits a screeching fear. The bugging eyes of a dead squirrel on my neighbor’s lawn still petrify me years later. Roadkills are also abandoned beings who go unnoticed by hundreds of pedestrians a day. Similarly, one becomes completely left behind in death, as no one can accompany you through it. The pulverization of roadkill on the street is a violent caricaturization of decomposition. It reduces someone’s body into an unidentifiable speck, symbolizing how our corpses will one day evaporate into the universe.

Rough and dry brush strokes were laid to capture the grittiness of my topic. The edges of my animals fade into their surroundings, showing how their bodies decay and become lost into the earth. The color harmonies are cold, with moments of browns and reds to evoke rotting flesh and blood. Three paintings are presented in the format of a biblical triptych in order to inspire spiritual contemplation, while the rest of the works offer more ways to look at death.