"Everything about the wasp except why"

A few months ago, I re-read a favorite book, A Species of Eternity by Joseph Kastner. It's an engaging history of the adventures of the explorer-botanist-naturalists of pre-colonial and colonial America and touches on how their discoveries were viewed in Europe. I came across something I'd never noticed before: In the 1700s, Parisians would pay more than the price of a pearl necklace for the nest of a North American paper wasp!

Well, I'm with Paris all the way on this one -- and JT knew the way to my heart when about ten years ago, he brought home an end-of-season partly dismantled wasp nest. If you've never seen the inside of one of these elongated globes, a revelation awaits you. The architecture is astonishing -- a series of five 6-sided egg casings (rather like slices of beehive) are stacked in descending size, with a "button" at the top.


The hive structure is encased by layer upon layer of wasp-recycled paper:-- newsprint transformed into rippling patterns of grays, dull yellows, light blues, and actually metallic-sheened silvers and golds. How do they do it?


What art could improve on this wonder? -- and yet, I was compelled to do something with it. I got out my coloured pencils and did a large drawing, just enjoying the experience of interacting with all its intricacies, all the ripples in its paper.


And not a moment too soon!! About a month later, now into the depths of winter, I walked into the studio one morning and found about three dozen groggy wasp youngsters staggering along the walls. ("Where are the trees and grass Mom told us about?") In family fashion, I captured as many alive as I could and put them and the entire hive outside. But I saved the outer wrapping and the little button (the cells of which had been empty all along) and later incorporated the latter into a pen-and-ink drawing called "Abandoned" -- which featured all kinds of empty nests, as it were.


Recently, I've been doing a big studio clean-up and still couldn't bear to throw out the wasp paper (or the button). My eyes happened on a second-hand picture frame I'd been given, the kind that has a linen mat which in this case was soiled and scratched. I realized now was the time to give it a new lease on life -- collaged with wasp paper!





The outcome is truly fabulous -- and I'll have to contemplate what kind of future painting I might make that would be worthy of it. Meanwhile, I again had the thrill of hanging out with the wonders of wasp-dom -- for one thing, how the layers of paper are "felted" together to create passageways for incoming/outgoing wasp workers.


I recalled again a line from Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales. Among the "useful presents" under the tree (distinct inferiors to the useless/fun presents), he lists: "...the books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."