Artworks / "Death by Water"

"Death by Water"

My work often deals with mortality. Being a gay man who at young age lost many friends through AIDS, I try to consider death in different ways, in this case as a transition. This painting was created based on The Waste Land Section IV: "Death by Water", by T.S. Eliot 1922.

The shortest section of the poem, "Death by Water" describes a man, Phlebas the Phoenician, who has died, apparently by drowning. In death he has forgotten his worldly cares as the creatures of the sea have picked his body apart. The narrator asks his reader to consider Phlebas and recall his or her own mortality.