Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Insect art: an overview

Out there on the blurred edges of animal art is the little known and rarely discussed field of art created by, but not necessarily for, insects. We are primarily talking here about spiders, flies, butterflies, and of course the master artists of the insect world, cockroaches. 

Having said that, we admit that we have had a bad run with insect art here at OTN. Yes, we did jump the gun on snail art and, as many OTN readers pointed out, our painting fly post left quite a bit to be desired, most particularly that the flies didn’t actually paint anything themselves but were part of a fly-artist combo that mostly relied on the artist for composition etc. 

But with cockroach art we are on much firmer ground. OK someone has to load them up (with paint that is) and set them down on the paper but from there on it is pure cockroach-inspired creativity that you see on the page. So here are a couple of paintings as a taster. You can see more here and read about how one man has dedicated his life to allowing these disliked insects express themselves.