So I know this is the end of term and so a good number of you will probably not take the time to read this entry, but I thought I should write it anyway... just in case.
I was watching a live talkshow from Quebec during the week-end and one of the guests was a painter (Marc Séguin) who used human ashes in some of his paintings. I thought it was a neat idea that linked itself to the serie of posts people did on 'different forms of interment' and all that. So there you go, people can have their ashes transformed into diamonds, into pencils, but also... paintings.
I was listening to what the artist was saying and at the same time, trying feverishly to type what I could hear and here is an interesting point the painter made: the problem for him is not using ashes as a medium to paint, but rather it's trying to find a subject that will be appropriate. He was saying how he didn't want to paint portraits of the people to whom those ashes 'belonged' but at the same time, he needed to respect the medium itself. At some point, he mentioned that this situation could prove problematic when the people who gave him those ashes were disappointed at the result of the painting: "Well, I gave you grandpa and you made a landscape painting out of him..."
Another problem created by this choice of painting material was that, for some states, people are not legally allowed to transport ashes from one state to the other. Marc Séguin was saying how it could become complicated to have a painting cross some borders when the medium was 'organic' like that.
I thought it was interesting to see all the consequences of removing ashes from their urn...
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