Bugs

Bugs are nature’s living jewels,  exquisite miniatures. Their bodies and wings display a wide range of color, iridescence, gloss & texture. One of my most beautiful memories is a cloud of blue morpho butterflies swirling in a Guatemalan coffee plantation, around the red ripening coffee beans. Their lovely wings shimmered through saturated blues, greens & purples. In Belize, on an island of the barrier reef on the so called “Mosquito Coast”. I counted more than 120 mosquito bites on a few square inches of my right ankle.

I have always been interested in insect beauty & intricacy. As a child in the old country, I learned how Armenian women from Musa Dagh raised silkworms and weaved home produced silk from thread extracted from the cocoons of the pupae. I remember the sound of silkworms eating mulberry leaves in a special covered basket used exclusively for their culture.

In grade school in Hartford, Connecticut I was enchanted by the click beetles, red dragonflies & green damselflies that swarmed a patch of swampy land filled with skunk cabbages near the Kennedy School of Missions where we lived while my father studied for his Master of Divinity degree. I acquired a caterpillar feeding on milkweed, and raised it into a black & orange Monarch butterfly. I studied the arthropods & commenced collecting them. Mom helped me make a butterfly net.

After my family moved to Fowler, California, I witnessed a glossy black widow spider overpowering a large beetle caught in its web, inside a drainpipe piercing the wall of my elementary school. One day I saw a pair of praying mantises mating on the screen of our porch. After the female ate the male, she extruded her egg case. When the babies hatched I put them on mom’s rose bushes, where they feasted on aphids.

The Psychedelic Surrealism of juxtaposing tiny bugs with huge buildings, machines, produce, illuminated Times Square advertising & big flowers & animals is the inspiration of the fine art print motifs in this section of my site. They commenced with masked 35 mm slide images multiple exposed on the Marron Carrel animation stand camera, & continued with my first color Mac computer running Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator.