I think the old man is the important piece of the picture. Our entire lives are spent climbing away from inescapable death. No matter what we do, a missed hand hold will eventually result in the fall into blackness. The old mans body is bound to fail him, and he will fall.
The thing I like most is the light that the subject of the painting is climbing towards. Sometimes, when I am in a situation where a negative outcome is unchangeable, I don't want to deal with it at all. why play the game of life when we all lose, sort of thing. I think the light is what makes it worth traversing the perils of the pit. I think the light is the things that make life worth living.
But I'm just some dude, and that's what I see. I think someone smarter will be able to tell me I'm wrong.
Yes. As you progress forward to new points of stability, you lose contact with the previous ones. It feels like you’re accumulating things in life, but time is entropy’s ceaseless expansion, and the things you relied on before are behind you and possibly even occluded by so many other layers of things in your life.
You’re hoping to reach somewhere to stop, but all there are, are handholds spaced too far to drape yourself across two.
You can’t rest. You have to keep reaching and climbing. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
For some reason in the thumbnail it looked like Mitch McConnell but when I zoomed in it looks like Jeb Bush to me... It's a really cool good looking piece, but my possibly sleep adled read of the face may have colored my view of the piece as a whole.
This is stupid, the spikes are already against the wall so they cant compress any further. The only risk is falling, the rest of the image adds nothing.