The art inspiring us

Painted during Ayobello’s intern year of residency, this work channels both personal memory and collective vulnerability. After consecutive shifts, Ayobello recalls drifting into sleep while driving home, an all-too-common risk for exhausted physicians. At the wheel, his eyes slip between wakefulness and oblivion, while beside him emerges a dark figure: Death itself, grinning, patient, inevitable.

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The skeletal harbinger presses close, its presence both intimate and terrifying. Through thick impasto strokes, Ayobello renders Death not as abstraction, but as an embodied force, the ridged, tactile shadows seeming to claw their way out of the canvas. The effect is visceral, pulling the viewer into the claustrophobic immediacy of the moment.

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This painting becomes more than an autobiography; it is testimony. It speaks to the hidden toll of medical training, where fatigue and burnout are not metaphors but real dangers, and where the boundary between healer and harmed grows perilously thin. Here, survival itself feels fragile, hinging on a single blink too long.

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