Because of their smallness, insects often go unnoticed––a glimpse of foreign geometry amongst the soft folds of flower petals, an unexpected color in a field of green, or the complete blending in save for a pair of beady eyes. However, their diminutive size is paired with awesome abilities. Next to human chaos, the life of an insect appears to be one of remarkable purpose and order. Insects propel life forward; pollinating plants, spelling survival or destruction for forests and gardens, inflecting our world with shape and color, and filling the days and nights with their sounds.

Rendered in an inexact hand, my larger-than-life paintings of insects are not those of scientific precision. My view is not the penetrating eye of science that seeks to dissect and understand nor shaped by the acquisitive impulse that furnishes the kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities). I seek neither to collect nor capture, rather to witness and record; to report back to my audience (such as it is) and to remember, myself, what it was to see these extraordinary creatures. My practice is perhaps akin to that of one of the very insects that I have painted: the honeybee.

My paintings are a record of a changing world, painted with an acute sense of time and of time running out for many species. As temperatures rise, and meteorological patterns shift, it is in the natural world where first these changes are evidenced. Small at first, a flower blooming several weeks earlier than usual or a few more inches of rain a season, these changes may not quickly register on our scale, amidst the blur of what human life has become––bent as it is away from the sun and towards the blue glow of screens––but as the proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wing, these small changes carry the gravest import for life on our planet.