Author
When I purchased my first framed butterfly, a small blood-red glider, entomology (insect) art was brand new to me. My butterfly’s museum frame allows me to look at the butterfly’s front and its back. I like flipping it from front to back, back to front, seeing both sides of its dazzling costume at once. The appeal of insects is most certainly due to their variety, color, and perfect architecture. Real insects have been used as an art supply throughout human history; as you can see here, bright beetle wings were used on an Indian textile art piece over 200 years ago. Now that I own a few pieces from this art genre, I have been seeing other entomology art pieces when I am not actively looking for them. It’s the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon at play--the frequency illusion--in which after seeing something for the first time, there is a tendency to see it more often. This past Christmas I saw It’s a Wonderful Life in the theater with my kids--an annual affair--and sure enough, George Bailey has butterfly art in his married home--the same butterfly art that was hung on the walls of his parents’ home earlier in the film. Before I acquired my little red glider butterfly, all the dozens of times I’ve seen the film, I’d never noticed.
While the Bailey home’s butterfly art resembles something akin to an Eagle Scout project, pretty but relatively amateur, some of today’s insect artists are making what is unquestionably fine art. Christopher Marley, based in Oregon, is the Master and Commander. When I recently stumbled upon an article featuring Ayesha Curry’s stunning home (styled by the multi-talented Ayesha herself), my eyes went right to black butterfly art on her wall. I know Christopher Marley’s work when I see it.  Ayesha Curry’s impeccable home decorating taste, which includes a mini-gallery of what must be Christopher Marley’s work, was featured on multiple websites, but none gave credit to Marley for his work. Hunt Slonem’s unmistakable bunny painting in her home is credited. Slonem shares a similar creature (butterflies and birds) obsession and repetition patterning with Marley, so Ayesha’s placement of their art on adjacent walls feels satisfying and harmonious. A conversation about insect art--or even contemporary nature-themed art--is incomplete without including Marley. It’s like talking about rock music without acknowledging The Beatles, pun intended. Marley’s subjects are butterflies and beyond: beetles, birds, sea life, snakes, even geckos. When he was a boy, Marley’s mother often ushered him outside, where he found nature could be an “omnipresent and unjudging friend.” As a young man and fashion model who traveled the world, he began to collect insects that bewitched him and eventually began arranging them in spectacular patterns. Marley’s artistic vision is one grounded in respect. Each specimen is “reclaimed,” which means it has died of natural causes and been ethically and legally gathered by different breeders, organizations and zoos around the world. The dazzling presentation of the organisms in shapes with sensual names (Celebria Prism, Limited Cerulean Genesis, and Aesthetica Mosaic, for example) highlights Marley’s extraordinary gift for marrying science and art. Christopher Marley’s work manages to simultaneously demystify and re-mystify. Just like anything else we label “other,” organisms that swim, crawl, or fly can be threatening and things we want to repel or avoid. It’s clear that Marley wants human beings to appreciate the organisms we find frightening and foreign-- their astonishing structures, their surprising beauty, and their worthiness of our wonder. His work gives us the opportunity to draw in close and see that what we thought was terrifying is also practically designed and uniquely and essentially placed in the ecosystem. At the same time, these creatures are relentlessly exotic, otherworldly in shape and color, both dead and living a second life in Marley’s work.  An arrangement of blood-red Gliders (like mine) in Marley’s “Sangaris Ellipse”
I recently acquired a Rainbow beetle ($79) and a Swallowtail butterfly ($149) from Insect Collective by Shane Morris, both for whom I have great affection. Once you’ve been to my house and seen my butterflies and beetle, you just might start seeing little creatures in art everywhere.
0 Comments
Butterflies should make entomologists (people who study insects) out of all of us in 2021. Is there any other living creature so universally admired? Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring 2014 Haute Couture collection was entirely inspired by butterflies. The models--the ”Papillons de Paris”--walked the runway in “playful reinterpretations of those winged beauties.”  “Life is a butterfly! So all the collection is that!” Gaultier explained. Small children are thrilled with the landing of a butterfly on their fingers; brides and grooms borrow butterfly beauty to style their weddings. We love to decorate our homes with butterfly art. Gaultier is right: we recognize Life itself in these magnificent, delicate creatures. We identify with their transformation. We envy their radical beauty. And we long to own their powers of seduction. Butterfly Transformation A butterfly begins as a rather vulgar little creepy-crawly: the 6-legged caterpillar. Caterpillars, who do absolutely nothing but eat (up to 86,000 times their own initial weight), shed their skins 5 times to make way for bigger and bigger bodies. They even shed their faces. The caterpillars’ stages are referred to as “instars,” far too heavenly a word for such strange little eating machines. The 5th instar becomes the chrysalis, and that is where the ugly eater, after 10-14 days, emerges as one of the most stunning creatures on Earth. There can be no doubt that we see ourselves at times as the grotesque caterpillar, toiling away every day. The monotony of the caterpillar’s day and its vulnerability to birds, ants, wasps, and people make its life entirely un-enviable--with the exception of the bizarre gift of leaving its old small selves behind. Discarding of old useless skin for a better fit; spinning a magical house to hide in; emerging as a new, better, more ravishing self: this is the stuff our fairy tales are made of. This year, we all ought to see our potential for symbolically undergoing a metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly. Butterfly Beauty Butterflies come in a baffling 17,500 species--over 750 of those in the United States. Their variety, elegance, and ethereal bodies have earned them the nickname, “flying flowers.” The Painted Lady / Cosmopolitan / Vanessa cardui is the most common; their migrations from North Africa to Britain and Ireland are a remarkable phenomenon. We human beings die at an average age of 78 years, in the midst of mental and physical decline. The Painted Ladies, who live about a year, die at the height of their beauty. Groups of people are crowds, mobs, hordes. En masse we perspire and complain. Groups of butterflies are called kaleidoscopes. En masse they soar and delight. The rarest of the butterflies is the Palos Verdes blue / Glaucopsyche lygdamus palosverdesensis. While its scientific name is sizable, its body is quite dainty (2.5-3 cm). These angels only live in the Palos Verdes Peninsula in southwest Los Angeles County, California.  Photo Credit: Frank Model, flickr This past year (2020), conservationists who carefully bred the endangered species, released 1000 of them into their natural habitat in secret locations. Why secret locations for the endangered Palos Verdes blues? Scarcity fuels desire. Consider the Hermes Birkin Bag. If you’re a Kardashian, you have a closet full. Just about anyone else can’t even get on a waitlist. From the most common to the rarest, each butterfly is unique and astonishing, as Instagram clearly illustrates we wish we could be. Butterfly Seduction Butterflies are not shy about their life mission: MATING. A mate is not easily won; it requires using all the tools Nature has provided: color, scent, competition, dance, and PERSISTENCE. Human beings have become quite lazy about their mating rituals, swiping and scrolling on dating apps feels like work. We become quickly discouraged--or worse, attract the wrong mate. If we would follow the example of the butterfly mating rituals, we might have better results. DATING, BUTTERFLY-STYLE 1. Let your style reflect who you really are. Butterfly colors distinguish male from female and species from each other. Even insects need help finding each other. 2. For gosh sakes, smell good. Butterflies use scent to communicate. They release chemicals into their environment (pheromones) that trigger a response in a potential mate. Pheromones are essential in human matches, too. Dating apps can’t help you with chemical attraction; we need to be in each other’s presence to determine a connection. 3. Fight for what you want. Male butterflies send out acoustic pulses or signals individually or in competitive groups (“lekking”). The female picks. Of course. 4. Seduce. The right look and winning a competition isn’t enough. The male butterfly must do a little jig. His dance around her, and the release of pheromones as he dances, must impress her enough for her to offer herself up. 5. Don’t give up. Females routinely first reject the mate they eventually accept. Males will persist, waiting until she’s in the mood. Having “butterflies” is the metaphor for the stirrings of love in our bodies. The flutter of excitement and passion echoes the flutter of fragile and otherworldly wings.  May 2021 be a year of butterfly-like transformation and beauty for us all, and the butterfly art on our walls, like this exquisite Swallowtail, remind us to be patient in this year's pursuits. |
