Mouse speak 15

Reworking of this picture from this website. Click to enlarge. 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.]

My search engine also found some distribution maps for different species of acacia when requested to find pictures of ‘acacia’. Maps are always interesting. Land masses, seas and oceans are formed more or less by chance and by mischance. This makes our planet a big chaos of mountains, deserts, woods, lakes, rivers and seas. Islands drown or keep their heads above the water and continents are carelessly and inefficiently shaped. Man has always tried to come to grips with his environment and with mapping the world. Mapping has in many ways always been the first condition to knowing and understanding a place and as such maps are pieces of art in them selves.

And so it is not really easy to rework a picture of a map like the one i used here. The original picture shows the distribution of Acacia nilotica, a tree species from Africa and India currently spreading over southeast Asia and Australia. The map shows this spreading. This results in a map in a map. In reworking the picture i only used the distribution of the acacia to shape a new map. Then i made the remaining shapes and blotches more or less furry or bristly and organic.

BP