Butterflies Painting

On a recent visit to a science museum, I found myself staring at a display of pinned butterflies. They were beautiful, yes, but they were also very dead. Pieces of their wing scales were flaking off, and you could see the pin heads sticking through their abdomens where they had been stabbed to the backboard. It was all a bit macabre. There was a tension there; in order to display these beauties to the world, and theoretically help their cause as a species, these individuals had to have their corpses reaped and desiccated for us to view. The butterflies probably don’t care much, but this piece is an attempt at achieving the same effect with less carnage.