Random Halloween Prompts: DARK

Jan Mankes

I wondered why, when I saw this picture I thought it was downright creepy.

It looked like the trees were dying, that they were starving, that the life was being choked out of them. I think it was that blueish gray color. It was corpse like.

And then, because I was obviously in a macabre frame of mind I decided I wasn’t looking at trees. I was looking inside of a lung- the tops of the trees looked like alveolis and the branches and trunks looked like bronchioles.

So after going over the picture I googled the artist and found out that  Jan Mankes died at the age of 30- of tuberculosis.

Jan painted a dark and airless world and it wasn’t a landscape- it was  self portrait.

A terrifying and beautiful self portrait.