The paintings of Death Self arose in Rini Price during the months that the Death Self poems were being written and read to her. The paintings are not responses to specific poems, and are not illustrations of them, but the process of death-self thinking, long familiar to her, released in her these images in spontaneous ways, following another near-Rilkean outpouring of 27 paintings the year before which were referred to as "the angries" until they received their more formal title from Rini's father-in law – "In Your Face" – a short time before he died.

Rini Price holds that "whatever is is OK because that's where you start from. It's got to be OK because that's what is. What you do with it, how you approach it, is what matters." Both Prices ascribe to the view expressed in Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning that the only freedom that can never been taken away from a person is the freedom to interpret and give meaning to what is happening to them.

Death Self was Rini Price's and V. B. Price's first formal artistic collaboration after 36 years of marriage, although many of V. B. Price's books have been designed, and their covers conceived and carried out, by Rini Price. The exhibition of these paintings and poems, along with this volume, was in process during the last weeks of the life of S. Jack Rini, Rini Price's father, beloved by his family, and a master at living, and dying, with attentiveness, generosity, and a loving good will. S. Jack was the principle investor in Century magazine in the early 1980s in New Mexico, a collaboration among Rini, her two siblings, Jim Rini and Jacki Fuqua, and V. B. Price.