Prints of Complete Insect Series, 20 x 24 high quality in

This is the page for the print versions of every member of this four part series "Brightly-Colored Insects on Black and White Animals".

Since they are in bulk, they have been individually discounted! You get a deal for buying the four at once, plus FREE SHIPPING!

Hopefully you like them. They are affordably priced so that you can have all the images arranged in your home according to whatever size you want and on one of four different types of material. They were designed to be displayed together, so this really is ideal. The prints are made from extremely high definition images so you don't really lose anything in the print quality. To see the other paintings in the series, click below! These are links for the originals.

All-- http://www.etsy.com/listing/92484557/four-part-insect-painting-series
Fly-- http://www.etsy.com/listing/92485251/four-part-insect-painting-series
Butterfly-- http://www.etsy.com/listing/92485765/four-part-insect-painting-series
Grasshopper-- http://www.etsy.com/listing/92486215/four-part-insect-painting-series

This series has been on display in the BYU Library and also the Mark Slusser Gallery of Salt Lake City.

This is a series I call "Brightly-Colored Insects on Black-and-White Animals". It has a fly on a cow, a butterfly on a baby tapir, a grasshopper on a zebra and a white-faced meadowhawk dragonfly on a loon. Down below I have a synopsis I wrote on their origin and meaning. I know they aren't like AMAZING or anything, but they are still cool.



About the series:
This series was first conceived of in the early part of 2008 while I was still on my LDS mission to the Baltics. Around the 12th of April I drew the first sketch when I was sick at home at my apartment on Eduarda Smiļģa Iela in Āgenskalns, Riga, Latvia (Āgenskalns is a borough on the West-central side of Riga). This was a concept sketch of the Green Bottle Fly on a Holstein Cow painting. They were originally conceived of as two paintings of cow pattern with flies in the upper and lower corners, one fly per painting. They would face each other in a room with grass-green carpeting, sky pattern ceiling and black cow pattern wall motifs, with the cow pattern of the paintings being brown. The ceiling would feature a pink udder glass chandelier. Optionally, this chandelier could be fitted with tubing running through each teat which dripped water into a collecting basin in the middle of the room. This water could then be recycled through pipes in the floor, up the wall and back through the udder.

I'm from Michigan and have a strong affinity for bovines. They are magnificently useful and mostly docile creatures, though on the Isle of Skye in Scotland I was once almost gored by a young Highland bull.

Shortly after doing this aforementioned sketch, I began to consider the paintings as elements worthy to stand on their own, outside of a dairy-themed living room. I thought about doing the painting as a single fly on a black Holstein cow, essentially how it looks today except the fly was in the lower-right corner rather than upper-left. This idea morphed in my mind to a set of four paintings which in turn would be more interesting if each insect and animal were different species. I had the fly/cow all formulated in my mind and then considered the others. I decided tentatively that the insects would be species of butterfly, grasshopper and dragonfly. The animals would be a baby tapir, zebra and loon or skunk. The idea was that they would always be displayed together in the same room. Of course, it was not till after my proselyting mission that work could begin on the paintings.

Like nearly all my artistic ventures, the idea appeared instantaneously in my mind, with all the information needed for how to make them, as if they were image files with instructions attached, uploaded to my brain from an offsite server. I credit God for anything good I am, have or do in my life and consider that server celestial.

Meaning of the Series:
Little by little I began to understand my bizarre compulsion to paint brightly colored insects on black and white animal pattern. Their meaning emerged slowly as spiritual in nature, although not obviously so.

Each insect and its accompanying background animal occur in the same environment in the wild. These paintings represent scenes which could and have possibly occurred when an insect happens to land on an high quality animal briefly, perhaps to lick salts off its back. I have often had this happen to me with praying mantises and ladybugs which realize they may not be safe and alight soon after landing. So these paintings represent very brief moments in time in a place distant and anonymous , unlikely seen by any human eyes. They are in other words beautiful images which are really just conceived of hypothetically by man, but seen and enjoyed regularly by a God aware of them without any humans realizing art is happening.

The paintings are meant to draw attention to the beauty of the insects which I have attempted to render as realistically as possible. As my father would say, I hovered over them with a two-haired brush till I became satisfied with their realism or recognized that I could not improve them. This was critical because the insects should appear in their true form as marvelously engineered miniature machines which are commonplace but no less beautiful when patiently examined. Unfortunately, humans always come up short when trying to capture the beauty of our world. It became clear to me that the insects' minute details were truly breath-taking in their beauty but are masterpieces we are not really aware of. It made me think about what other beautiful images I was missing out on in my daily human experience.

The central idea became: if insects, the humblest of animals, are so well-designed, assembled and brightly illustrated then how much more beautiful are you, a human? They are meant to remind people that human lives are precious. Individuals are not something to be trivialized, objectified or denigrated. If animals can be so beautiful it ought to give us pause to ponder the worth of our own souls and bodies, as well as theirs.

They are also meant to give the viewer a small sense of infinity as they approach the insects, observe tiny details which come out on close inspection and then think how small these insects really are and how big the animals are in comparison. But these animals are also small in comparison with the Earth and then the universe, yet all these things are tiny details in a cosmic masterpiece.

Details:
Each painting is 20x24 in. The fly painting is all acrylic while the others have acrylic backgrounds and oil insects. The series has taken since summer of 2009 till January of 2012, but work was not always regular.
1) Green Bottle Fly on a Holstein Cow
2) Dyson's Swordtail on a Baby Tapir
3) Elegant Grasshopper (Zonocerus elegans, a species of South African Bushlocust) on a Zebra
4) White-faced Meadowhawk Dragonfly on a Common Loon