from the front, fully visible, showing a sign reading "SILENCE," the sign brings out the emptiness of the execution chamber. The image, the chamber empty , showing only the sign, represents death as an absence and complete silence. This was characteristic of Warhol, who once said "I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish and everything could just keepgoing on the way it was, only you just wouldn't be there," and who often stated that he wanted a blank tombstone when he died. Many wonder why Warhol chose such themes to focus on, and he himself gives little reason. For some of these works, in which he shows images repeated relatively unchanged, he was attempting to lessen the shock of the viewer, recognising such events as everyday occurrences. "When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect." Others claim that the reason why he choose these themes was that he as an artist was trained to collect images from the media, and that they interested him.He certainly was a "media junkie " who continually pursued and collected printed material. He was easily drawn to the sensationalised private lives of the main characters of the news. Maybe this is the reason why he did so many celebrity portraits.In 1967, Warhol celebrated the immortality of Marilyn Monroe by creating a series of paintings based on a publicity photo. The colourful variations on the original photograph are indicative of the style Warhol created and are some of his most recognisable works.Throughout the Death and Disaster paintings, Warhol makes use of background colour to serve various functions. Mostly, throughout the series, he avoids the use of primary colours, using mainly secondaries, such as oranges, lavenders, and pinks, the types of colours "you would expect to find in a wallpaper store." The images Warhol selected for these paintings were gruesome, though they showed his brilliant eye for using such images to...
