My latest watercolor paintings are of desktop existential dramas starring all the bugs in my studio. Continuing my ongoing concerns with mortality, fragility, memory and desire, these images of current or impending annihilation also nudge into a new direction the ironic-Romantic impulses that have inspired my previous work. Each of the subjects of these paintings appears vastly magnified on a starkly empty stage, often with melodramatic lighting fading into nothingness in the distance. The fact that the players in many of these staged scenes are mere bugs does not detract from their modest grandeur. In fact, the scale of these paintings, fairly generous for watercolors, is such that a wealth of normally hidden detail is revealed. Who knew, for instance, that the jointed armor of an ordinary sowbug resembles highly polished marble in bright light? Or that the iridescent wings of a mosquito are fringed all around with long, fine hairs like eyelashes? Based on my own macro photography of the fauna "native" to my studio and adjacent outdoor work space, these pictures reveal the hidden beauty and potential pathos of a world that is all too often overlooked — that is, when it is not being inadvertently crushed underfoot.


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