Someone has some explaining to do

 

 

 

And that someone would be me.  First, the title photo is not, of course, of a ladybug – but it shows how beetle-y bugs started showing up in my environment as I began to plan the Beetlemania series.  I'll call it the Capilano Beetle – it's a foot-long metal sculpture that shared the picnic area with me at Capilano Suspension Bridge in September.  I don't think we want to inquire about its own picnic menu (…something to do with deforestation…).

 

Second – and this requires a little math – if a wannabe artist plans to do two paintings a month and is already behind schedule at mid-month, is  it likely she'll complete a second painting in another month of 30 days (the second in a row)?   No explanation required – the answer is "No."

 

So this month-end post is dedicated to a Beetle Backgrounder – or as they call it these days, an "Explainer."  Ready for some fun facts and digressions?  Here we go.

 

Fact #1:  Ladybugs/beetles, all the Coccinellidae, can be found all over the world.

 

Here's one in my own Vancouver yard:

 

And here are two glorious denizens of a lovingly tended garden some miles west of Budapest.

  

 

Fact #2:  When it comes to Ladybug Love, it's best to focus on the positives.

 

I feel the same about my ladybug fixation as I do about horoscopes.  I'll believe all the good stuff and ignore the dubious.  Horoscope example:  Geminis (like me) are youthful, creative, quick-witted.  (Negatives to ignore: They are lying thieves.)  Ladybug example:  Ladybugs are treasures to entice to your garden. (Negatives to ignore: Some of them bite, and some invade your house in the winter).

 

Because my readers can be trusted to keep secrets, here's a preview of the "Beneficial Insect Habitat" that I'm giving my next-door neighbours for Xmas.  It's beautiful in itself, isn't it?  I'm soooooo excited.

 

Actually, my camera lens went a bit cross-eyed with all the circles and indentations.

 

Fact #3:  Ladybugs inspire artists, as well as small children and their grandmothers.

 

 

This shows how ladybugs and other insects have enthralled UK ceramic artist Anna Collette Hunt.  For more of her inspired insect jewelery, click here.

 

And I'll leave to your imagination – because just too precious for the airwaves – the image of an angelic 5-year-old, glowing with happiness in her Halloween ladybug cape and antennae.  She's about four times that age now, but every bit as precious.  And that's a fact – direct testimony from her Gramma.

 

Fact #4:  You can have a lot of fun with entomological etymology.

 

Hit that link and you'll see an insect that camouflages itself as a leaf!  And while it's fun to put those two words in the same sentence, I should really refer to taxonomy  – as the classification of things into groups and sub-categories – in this case, scientific nomenclature.

 

Whew!  Well, I love words, but I'll be brief.  While these words themselves – entomology, etymology, taxonomy – have Greek roots, the beetle names have Latin as their base.  For example, the Seven Spot Ladybird is Coccinella septempunctata.  The 22-spotted Ladybug is Psyllobora vigintiduopunctata.

 

Get the point?  Think punctuation.  "Punct" is even the word for the grammatical period (or full stop) in German. 

 

I even found an example in anatomy, though I don't think you'll see many of these "puncta" in works of portrait art.

 

 

 

It's just as well that Greek is not the base – otherwise, with the 15-spotted ladybug (Anatis labiculata), we might be faced with the Omicron variant.  (I'm not being flippant – I held my breath when I looked it up).

 

Fact #5:  Insects have feelings.

 

With thanks to our European correspondent, I'll note a recent BBC article, "Why insects are more sensitive than they seem."   It's a fascinating long read with remarkable close-up photos and research findings like these:  

"In fact, there's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control. They can be optimistic, cynical, or frightened, and respond to pain just like any mammal would. And though no one has yet identified a nostalgic mosquito, mortified ant, or sardonic cockroach, the apparent complexity of their feelings is growing every year."

Can you see this one's smile?

 

Fact #6:  The collective noun for a group of ladybugs is "a loveliness."

 

Can this be true?!?  I'm inclined to accept it because my source is an unknown writer on the Gulf Islands, and in my experience, Islanders are pretty attuned to nature's loveliness.

 

Now how about this group as they beetle along:

  

 

Oh! What?! How did they slip in here?  You might have guessed they're from my favourite boutique bakery-café  in Upper Westside Manhattan where I regularly view the plat du jour. 

 

I think this means that this edition of the Beetle Chronicles has gone on long enough.  So sit back and imagine a tasty delicacy in all its loveliness, along with your own beverage of choice….and you're bound to see beetles everywhere.  I can't really explain it.

 

 

Connecting the dots (just don't try to count them)

 

If you read on to Beetlemania Part 2 and find yourself asking, "What's going on here?!", it all makes total sense in this artist's oeuvre.  You might remember some periods of high seriousness over the past year or so – the Zodiac Café series (portraits showing the physical characteristics of the Zodiac signs); the Emulation Series (copying or emulating the style of artists I admire) – and finally the recent decision to say to myself, "What the heck; I'll just have fun doing what I please."

 

I've mentioned before my fascination with the surrealist artist Georgio de Chirico and -- guess what – I'm totally in synch with the revered Metropolitan Museum of Art!  Their surrealism exhibit is on now – scroll down a bit in this link to view a brief video that gives a glimpse of it all.

 

Well, that's all I needed to feel confident in establishing my own new art movement, based on the dot at the middle of my own artistic centre:-- Colour!!  I've dubbed it "Chromo-surrealism" and everyone is welcome to bring their paints and crayons and join in the fun.

 

The Beetle Beings have a built-in rapport with this movement, and I found some of them in the fitness room, preparing for their imminent journey.  As I tried to capture them, I thought I'd build on an aspect of composition that often intrigues me:-- the pattern made by the spaces between objects.

 

This should have been simple but, even as I tried different sizes and poses, I couldn't quite pull it together.  It's all a game, you know.  The greater game in the "Beetlemania" series is to answer the question: "Can I make a coherent composition from all these disparate patterned parts?"

 

All right.  Back to Square One – trying fewer movable parts, more closely spaced.

 

Continuing to vary some of the poses, I decided to go with this layout.

 

With the plan finalized, this is a good place to introduce the fitness freaks.  Remember the rules:  No counting the dots; no chanting the  "Ladybird, Ladybird" chant – or singing the song.  (Confidential to Anne-with-an-E – check out the song and see where the ladybird daughter hid herself!)

 

 

And they are:  (1) Steel-blue Ladybird; (2) Twenty-spot Ladybird; (3) Ten-spotted Ladybird; (4) Seven-spot Ladybird; (5) Mealybug Ladybird.

 

This might also be the place to answer everyone's burning question:  Are there male ladybirds?  See here for the answer – and for the history back to the Middle Ages of "The Beetle of Our Lady."

 

Onward now to the beginnings of the colour lay-in:

 

And now…something entirely unprecedented:  I'm going to post a not quite finished painting that still needs some adjustments.  So what?   I'll be like Matisse and tiptoe back into the gallery and make my corrections after the exhibit is hung.

 

Oops!  That was Matisse.   Here's my own "Beetlemania - Pre-flight Warm-up (Semi-final version)" (copyright 2021).

  

And now – after all the commotion – the sun rises on a new day here in Vancouver, November 17^th, 2021.  We'll see where Chromo-surrealism takes us next.

 

On schedule for All Hallows Eve -- WILD creatures!

  

One doesn't want to delve toooo deeply into old-time Halloween lore -- some of it is downright creepy.  But I came across these playful (?) wodewose guys and thought they'd suit my purpose as I launch a new series based on wild beings that enchant us.

 

It started when my friend Y – she of Budapest fame and the "Anonymus" statue – sent me an image of this poster, which delighted both of us.

 

 

 

It's only been in recent years that I've given thought to whether any of the ladybugs I find in the garden have the same number of spots.  (Answer: Not necessarily)  Now, I could not get out of my head the variety of these Coccinellidae.  Where etymology meets entomology, that's their family name – and there are 5000 varieties of them worldwide.

 

And thus was born my Beetlemania Series.  Before we go any further, you need to understand that there are some discussions that are off-limits for this first painting and any that follow.  First, no counting the actual number of spots!  Second, no objections on geographic grounds – as to whether the Beetle Beings would actually be found in the same location.  Third, no reference to cochineal even though it can be a fascinating subject for artists.  The cochineal insect is not even in the ladybug family but still – ordinary human, or insect, decency would leave it out of the conversation.  Fourth, and most important, NO reference to that tacky song that made me wince in childhood, "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home……"  If you can't resist, check here, but no singing out loud, please.

 

Now, to begin.  And the first thing is for three team leaders to review the flight plan.  Here they are, in three trial runs – the third trial, I decided, the most promising.

 

 

It took me an inordinate amount of time to get that far – and farther to this scaled-up starting point:

 

 And then on to laying-in the colours.

 

 

 Maybe it's time now to introduce the Dramatis Personae.  Clockwise from the left standing figure:  The Eyed Ladybug, the 15-Spotted Lady Beetle, and the Yellow-Shouldered Lady Bird.  (Remember: No counting, no singing).

 

Here's the final version, first in the Beetlemania Series:  "Reviewing the Flight Plan" (copyright 2021).

 

 I'm going to give the last word this time to surrealist Giorgio de Chirico: 

"It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense of itself, which has no subject, which means absolutely nothing from the logical point of view...should speak so strongly in us...that we feel compelled to paint..."

 Look closely and see if you can figure out where the flight plan will take us next.

 

 

 

Earth Art - can you dig it?

  

 

Reader-sleuths of this blog will know that when I start writing about Earth Art, it means I haven't met my personal deadline for two paintings a month.  But there's cool stuff to behold here and lots of pictures – even if you might already have seen some of them. And this post continues the story I'd hinted at in August.

 

The title photo is "My Deepest Dig for Buried Treasure" – the last mighty trowel-dug hole in my Summer 2021 Rooting Around project. The shovel is there just for scale because the ground all across this part of Vancouver is glacial till – hardpan, some seams of tough clay, and pebbles, stones, rocks of all sizes.  I could only accomplish my awesome feat (applause, please) by getting down and dirty – kneeling on the ground, forcefully digging in with my trusty sharp 20-year-old trowel.

 

I hadn't expected this when my back yard jungle began to flourish in May.

 

But by July, it was evident that the jungle was being overrun with far-flung shoots from my cherished Rosa nutkana, the Pacific Coast's wild rose that's been in our family since the early 1980s. 

  

 

The rosy-red arrows give an idea of what faced me.

 

And as I knew, even before trowel hit ground, where there are shoots, there must be roots – and lots of them, some travelling out as far as 15 feet from the parent plant.

 

 

It wasn't long before I realized that a total upheaval of this quadrant of my small back yard was required.

 

This task took me from mid-July, through heat waves and smoke, to mid-October. I'd have made more progress except the quadrant includes Linus' Place in the Sun.  He's my next-door neighbour's aging cat, in camouflage here after he adopted one of my weeding buckets and a random chunk of concrete as THE perfect patio furniture.

 

When I was able to beat Linus to the Back Forty, I was sometimes rewarded with treasures that lurk below the surface.  I forgot to mention that the ground here also yields random bits of person-made stuff.  My neighbours and I guess that some of it goes back to when our houses were originally built (1912 to the mid-20's) and then to whenever it was (1950's-60's?) that the newer buildings across the laneway were built and perhaps our yards verged on their construction dumping ground.

 

I love the funky old rusty bits, including the nails that always remind me of Giacometti sculptures  – see  his "Standing Woman" as an example.

 

Of course, I can get totally absorbed in the beauty of even the smallest pebbles.  This stone, about the size of an egg, is one of the most intriguing I've ever seen – with what was once a magic bubbling brew intruding into more solid dark igneous rock.

 

 

And then there are the combinations of natural and person-made objects.  Look at this grape-sized blue-striped pebble in a chunk of concrete:

 

 

And my *great find* of the whole project:-- "Mud Duck", sitting here on top of an upended small pill bottle.  He's scarcely bigger than a walnut.

 

There was also a late-breaking dark surprise – errant BAMBOO ROOTS, where I hadn't expected to find them!  You're thinking it, aren't you? ….that I might be rooting around again in Summer 2022, searching out Fargesia nitida.  (If I don't say its name, it won't happen….?)

 

I would have become demoralized if that very day I hadn't at last worked my way to the root of the Mother Plant. 

 

The next day, I made a point of proudly showing it to every last neighbour on my block.  Linus' dad, an Indigenous construction worker with a quick wit and dry sense of humour said, "You know, you REALLY need to start a Facebook group." 

 

With the root extracted, I could begin to reconstruct the scene of the crime.  Approaching the finish line, I placed the largest of my excavated rocks in the front row.

 

And here, as of October 13^th, is the Grand Finale – as far as I'll go this season.  By the way, I rooted cuttings of the cherished Rosa nutkana in a big pot which is now installed several feet above ground in the green container by the fence. Before long, it will be hidden behind some shrubs I'd had to cut back and have now relocated.  I've trimmed as many shoots and rootlets from the Mother Root as I can, and I'm leaving it outside to weather – it makes quite a gorgeous objet d'art  – more Brancusi than Giacometti.

 

The garden site has been put to bed – and so has Mud Duck, who found a compatible nest on my dining table.   He's dropped off to sleep to the mantra, "A rose is a root is a rose."