Let's Paint those Tombstones!

Ok, so I won’t mention the cemetery in which this thought occurred to me, lest people run in there and start painting the tombstones. A few weeks ago I was walking through it and I was drawn to a small swath of blue color on a large, stark white marble headstone. My first though was that someone had splotched it with blue paint! Turned out it was a piece of painter’s tape – you know (or maybe you don’t), the weak masking tape they sell to border moldings when you’re painting the walls in your house. That said, I’m not sure why it was even there, but it got me thinking.

In prior blogs, I wrote about painting cemetery statues with light (How to Paint Tombstones), but then I thought, how about with actual paint?! You know, picture tempera paint, something water-based that will wash off in the rain (think sidewalk chalk drawings a la Mary Poppins). Or maybe something permanent like tinted hydrostatic paint (the kind with which you seal basement walls). How cool would those weather-beaten white marble headstones look if artists were to paint them! You know, highlight the worn detail areas so they could be discerned. (I personally would not do this as I am no artist - my effort would end up looking like the work of a third-grader!)

What might the end result look like? Sort of like what I did with these images in Photoshop. I am picturing colorization of the effect one might achieve with tempera paint, since this is what the piece of masking tape brought to mind – simply painting the raised characters e.g. the names, dates, and epitaph one color, with a contrasting background. The sculpted and engraved symbols can be other colors. Another idea would be to use pastel-like shades so the stones take on the look of those hand-tinted old black and white photographs. Maybe a cemetery can offer a contest, get a bunch of artists together for a day to temporarily paint some headstones (like the sculptors who participate in sand castle-building contests on the beach)!

This is all tongue-in-cheek, of course, I’m not seriously suggesting this at all, but sometimes my brain just puts all these ideas together in well, the way an unsupervised child might make a stew. I mean, what would the families of the dearly departed think? Well, it is another way of memorializing the dead, of keeping them in our memory. Permission would need to be given by the family (descendants), of course. But maybe there are none -  we’re talking about grave markers that are a hundred and more years old. You may not know this unless you hang around in graveyards, but the use of marble for headstones became far less popular toward the end of the 1800s. Taphophiles on the other hand, take this fact for granite (pun intended).

Speaking of granite, paint would adhere to it with greater difficulty than it would to marble, I suppose, since marble is much more porous. After painting, we could apply a preservative chemical over the whole thing like they do with bronze statues to keep them from oxidizing.

Perhaps the stones could be painted with surreal designs or camouflaged as green grass so people would walk into them! Families can commission artists to paint the headstones or other monuments (artists can always use the money: What’s the difference between an artist and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of four!). They can even leave the design up to the artist, like the way Philadelphians commission artist Izaiah Zagar to create and install mosaics of broken mirrors and ceramic on their homes and businesses. Maybe the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program could have a branch called the Philadelphia Tombstone Arts Program …

Of course all this could possibly lead to only one thing: someone might eventually get carried away and suggest shrink-wrapping the headstones like they do with advertising vehicle wraps. Hey wait a minute - this would not hurt the stone, it would preserve it, and it could be printed with all the same information and designs as the headstone underneath - why not?

A Photographer’s Dream

I had a fever-induced epic dream last night that I thought I’d share with you. Since many people try to interpret their dreams, I’ve offered some clues which I've stated in the numbered references at the end. My wife is a psychotherapist so I thought I’d do some amateur analysis along the way.But first, a bit of background material.

I was trying to wean myself off a corticosteroid/antibiotic cocktail my doctor prescribed for my sinus infection. After two doses, my nose began running like a faucet, I had a fever, chills, cough, you name it. Naturally, when I phoned the doctor to notify him of the side effects he couldn’t be reached. So I decided to stop the meds. I waited until the next dose was due and instead took something that would stop my nose from running and control my coughing fits. So the dream came as I was riding the Green Dragon (Nyquil), which was bucking against the retreating forces of the prescription meds. Also, I don’t remember my dreams very often, so this entire experience was quite notable for me.

The dream began with me trying to figure out how I would pick up a used bed¹ from a friend,² in my car³ on my way back from Cape Hatteras, NC, with an old girlfriend.⁴ I decided I would drive my car through the big city (whatever that was) to my friend's house, remove the bed from the wall (it was attached to the wall), and then pick it up on my way back from Hatteras a few days later.

The morning of the big trip, I wake up in my bedroom in my parents’ old house⁵ and begin to pack my bags. I have my cell phone with me. I’m in the bathroom sitting on the toilet, and I hear my father (who is deceased), shuffling up the hall to the closed bathroom door. Without saying anything, he slowly slides a new smallish bathroom rug under the door (my wife, the psychotherapist, will have a field day with that one, I’m sure).

So now I’m on the road, driving through the congested traffic of a big, multi-lane inner city traffic circle. I get pissed that the traffic is not moving so I turn down the next street, even though I don’t know where that goes (my wife will testify that this is quite normal behavior for me).  A few block away, I come to an intersection (and this is where the fun begins) with what looks like a rocky vacant lot on the right. It’s quite hilly, narrow, like a double-deep rowhome lot, let’s say 15 feet wide and about a hundred feet deep. The terrain gradually increased in height from the road until it reached about twenty feet toward the back.

As I squinted at the large rocks protruding out of the ground, I realized they were old, worn tombstones! Yay! Park the car, out with the cameras. I put down all my gear where the embankment was about ten feet high and just grabbed my DSLR to take with me.⁶ I scrambled up the hill, to the curiosity of a couple teenaged girls walking by, and spent about ten minutes photographing worn designs and inscriptions on the granite stones.  Most of which were about three by four feet in size – granite, for you cemetery purists.⁷ I happened to look down toward my car, and there were two men, about in their mid twenties, fiddling with my cameras that I had left at the bottom. Just as I started to scramble down and yell, “Hey!” one of the guys tossed my film SLR⁸ to the ground. I watched as pieces broke off it.

I got down to where they were and started yelling, “What the hell’s wrong with you? Why would you do that?” I noticed the guy who tossed my camera was holding his own digital Mamiya medium format camera (worth about $30,000), so I added, “ … and to a fellow photographer?!” They were both very apologetic and moved away to discuss the situation in private. I waited until they came back. They were still arguing between themselves until finally the guy who broke my camera pulled two paper sketches out of a bag and handed them to me, as if I were to accept these as payment for my broken camera. They were each about twenty inches square and had hand-drawn random geometric shapes all over them. I assumed they were the Mamiya-owner’s original artwork. I also noticed on the back of each sketch was handwritten “$11.00.”

Next thing I knew, I was back up on the hill photographing through an endoscope. An endoscope is a long hose (they come in varying thickness) with fiber optic and instrument channels for performing non-invasive medical procedures.⁹ I work with these in my job at a hospital, and in fact, the Ear Nose and Throat doctor ran one up my nose a few days ago to check my sinuses. You can look through them as well as photograph through them. I got kind of bored with photographing the tombstones this close-up when I realized there was a tiger mask hanging on the fence bordering the hilly lot.

I made a few photographs of the tiger face mask while I shaded the sun over the lens with my hand. I think my hand became a lampshade and I found that that if I moved it into just the right position, it looked like the tiger was wearing a hat. I took a few pictures of this and was quite pleased with myself. There were two artsy-crafsy twenty-something women watching my technique with great interest.

I woke up on drenched pillow cases and bedclothes. Apparently, I sweated the toxins out of my body. Now I’m back to my old sick self, complete with head congestion – the only thing different is that my back hurts (either from climbing all over that cemetery hill or because all my ligaments are dissolving, which is one of the side-effects of the steroid I took). If you’ll excuse me, I must go and burn the sheets.

Reference notes to the above text:

1. Our daughter just turned three and we just bought her a new bed.

2.  The friend was the adult version of a boy I  who I knew in grade school – I have had no contact with him since eighth grade.

3. Impossible, as I own a Saab convertible.

4.  I’ve never been to Cape Hatteras and to my knowledge, neither has the ex-GF.

5. House is demolished now, we lived there in the 1960s.

6. Odd, I would never leave anything unguarded like that in the real world.

7. The interesting thing I see here is that granite typically does not wear and crack like the stones in this dream, which leads me to think this was not a cemetery at all, but a dumping ground for the tombstones from an actual cemetery.

8. Pentax ME-Super, which has been broken for ten years, but I still hang on to it.

9. I’m trying to keep some sense of decorum here, so suffice it to say an endoscope is used to examine an internal body cavity. Let your imagination run wild.