Azrael is the fifth installation of a series of five #paintings I’ve made around a time that coincides with the yearly festival of #Halloween 2023. The frames contain some earlier reflections I had about the aftermath of the recent #pandemic. The stylistic concept deviates substantially from most of my other works, although parallels can be drawn with the works that feature in my series Art in the Dark.
Azrael, Arabic ʿIzrāʾīl or ʿAzrāʾīl, in Islam, the angel of #death who separates souls from their bodies; he is one of the four #archangels (with Jibrīl, Mīkāl, and Isrāfīl) and the Islamic counterpart of the Judeo-Christian angel of death, who is sometimes called Azrael.
An estimated 2.9% of U.S. adults (7.5 million) became new gun owners from 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021. Most (5.4 million) had lived in homes without guns, collectively exposing, in addition to themselves, over 11 million persons to household #firearms, including more than 5 million children. Approximately half of all new gun owners were female (50% in 2019 and 47% in 2020 to 2021), 20% were Black (21% in 2019 and in 2020-2021), and 20% were Hispanic (20% in 2019 and 19% in 2020-2021). By contrast, other recent purchasers who were not new gun owners were predominantly male (70%) and White (74%), as were gun owners overall (63% male, 73% White).
Death anxiety, also known as thanatophobia, is #anxiety produced by thoughts of one’s own death (fear of death). Its negative impacts have been shown in various areas of people’s lives such as pessimism, despair, poor understanding of social support, and insufficient life perception. It may lead to behavior that ignites a secondary death wave: mass shootings, eating disorders, suicides, substance abuse … they are all on the rise since the covid-19 pandemic.
The Maharajagar 