Information:
Painted in 2023, later assigned Design index number 005 for the studio records, titled the Memento Mori Mandala.
Photoshop and Wacom Cintiq/Stylus
Artist Statement
The Memento Mori Mandala began at the drafting table through sustained anatomical studies, drawing human, animal, and prehistoric skulls from direct reference. I wanted to see how the stark, uncompromising reality of bone could anchor the harmonious order of a radial composition.
Departing from the warm, saturated color stories across the rest of the series, this piece deliberately drains chromatic heat as it moves outward toward the periphery, shifting into cold grays, bone tones, and pale twilight. The composition operates in the traditional Victorian sense of the phrase: not as an indulgence in morbidity, but as a functional instrument of focus.
My background in esoteric study frames mortality as an essential threshold of transformation rather than a dead end. Arranged around the center, the skull motifs mark the universal passage through shadow that gives weight to the light. It is an honest meditation piece designed to strip away ambient noise and make the remaining time feel tangible, deliberate, and immediate.
Studio Notes for the Catalog
Every culture builds its own architecture around the one truly universal mystery: death. In myth and legend, the figures who return with wisdom are always the ones who voluntarily descended into the underworld, faced its cold permanence, and climbed back out.
In esoteric work, that descent is not a metaphor you browse through from a safe distance. It is an intentional confrontation with your own mortal limits. On the Qabbalistic Tree of Life, the path toward deeper understanding demands crossing the Abyss: the threshold of Da’ath, where ordinary assumptions fall away and you meet the raw, unadorned truth of what remains when ego is stripped to bone.
When I sat down to draw this piece, I stayed away from the bright palettes and easy harmonies of the earlier mandalas. I started with anatomical sketches. I filled page after page with human jawlines, animal craniums, and ancient fossil structures, testing my hand against the dense geometry of bone.
As the radial design formed, I decided to invert my usual lighting rules. Instead of radiating warmth outward, the heat pulls backward into the center, fading into ash, stone, and cold peripheral light. The skulls become the stabilizing rings of the circle, linked like rungs on a hermetic ladder.
The Memento Mori Mandala was never intended to sit quietly in the background as cheerful decor. It was built for the room where you do your hardest, most honest thinking. It sits on the wall to do one job: remind you that time is finite, distraction is cheap, and the work you choose to do today is the only thing that answers the silence.