Memento Mori 9.0

MEMENTO MORI 9.0
The crown arrived first.
Before the composition found its final form, before the background settled into its explosion of colour and floral pattern — the crown was always there. Because this is not a skull of mourning. This is a skull of completion. A being who made it all the way through — through the confusion and the clarity, the loss and the love, the accumulated weight of a life fully lived — and arrived at the other side wearing exactly what that journey earned.
In Tana Toraja, they say the dead are not truly gone until the ceremony is complete. Until then, they are simply ill — present, waiting, still part of the household. The living tend to them, feed them, speak to them. The leaving is not abrupt. It is a passage that the whole community accompanies, with music and colour and the kind of feasting that says: this life mattered so much that its ending requires our fullest celebration.
Memento Mori 9.0 was painted from that understanding.
The skull crowned and vivid against a background of florals in full bloom — not a reminder of death but a portrait of someone who has already done the hardest thing there is to do. Who passed through. Who is now, in whatever form that takes, on the other side of the density — lighter, freer, carrying only the essence that the physical life was always trying to distil.
Remember that you will die. And know that when you do, if you lived well, someone will paint you like this.
A3 (29.7 × 42 cm) · Acrylic on wood panel · 2024 · One of a kind Unframed. Signed on the front and on the reverse. Certificate of Authenticity included.