Mouse speak 14

Reworking of this picture of this website. Copyright Villa La Repubblica 2010

[In this series I rework pictures from the internet, using my mouse and the paint facility. I use the search engine Alltheweb to find pictures for me. I use existing words from the Dutch dictionary and encyclopaedia to have the search engine find pictures for me. Usually it finds unexpected things. I also use Wikipedia pictures now and then. Click here and scroll to see the whole series.]

Strange enough having my search engine find pictures for the word ‘acacia’ also delivered quite a few pictures of small and modest tombstones from a cemetery in Chicago. Some people in Chicago have probably taken up the idea of making a photographic collection of tombstones in a cemetery. The tombstones being modest and quite plain this collection becomes a monument for those people who played their own simple role in life but who were all part of a bigger body called Chicago, like molecules in an object or like – indeed – cells in a body. Still these tombstones make the dead become individuals as they were in life, just by having a name and a date.

It was the uniformity in the collection that intrigued me, the pictures themselves not being very special. What moved me was the shade of scrubs and trees which you can see in the original picture. Quite a few civil cemeteries are planted with shrubs and trees. Probably to bring some peace of mind to visitors and relations of the loved ones. But plants and trees are also signs of life and death themselves, especially in countries with clearly recognisable seasons. Plants and trees are ‘mindless’ living creatures who in spite of that lend their shade to tombstones like the ones on the picture.

Altogether i found the whole collection of pictures of tombstones quite a moving idea. So, what to do with these pictures? Giving any explicit comment would easily make the result sentimental. But reworking a picture is ALWAYS giving a comment. So i decided to do something with the shade in one of the pictures. I’ve chosen two colours which have nothing to do with death (at least in my perception). Except for the fact computer colours always look a bit lifeless as they are not put on a material surface. But that gives them another quality: they are shining. In that way i tried to create a new picture which is still solemn but in another way, with colours that might be called tasteless (but what is taste?). The shade becomes fluid and shiny but also monumental.

BP