Each of my Specimens is an insect painted by hand, an original watercolour offered as a fine art print, and the second word of its Latin name is a small confession. It tells you whether the creature is real, or whether I changed it. I have always loved tiny things, the details most people walk straight past without seeing. There is an absurd amount of beauty hidden in something as small as the wing-case of a rose chafer, in nothing but its colour, and almost no one ever stops to look. The Specimens are where I began to catch that, in the old tradition of nature illustration, and to make it mine.
An absurd amount of beauty hides in the things no one stops to see.
The bee that honours a monk
The bee grew out of my first steps into beekeeping, a world I am still learning. I had always loved being in nature, but here I was learning to work with it directly, opening the hives, looking for the queen, clearing an overgrown comb, always low and calm, because bees feel exactly how you are. It is the same calm this kind of painting asks of me, the same steadiness the detail demands. From a master beekeeper I learned an extraordinary amount, about how a colony lives and orders itself, about the bees and their genetics, until fascination became something closer to obsession. I kept a sketchbook with me the whole time and filled it with everything I heard.
The bee is a male Buckfast, a drone. The Buckfast is a real strain, bred a century ago by Brother Adam, a monk at Buckfast Abbey in England, so the name I gave it, Apis fratris, is literal: the bee of the brother. I painted it from life with no plan at all, holding its anatomy in my mind from looking and then simply copying what I saw. It is built from more layers than anything else I have made, and it is the painting where I was most grateful for the quality of the paper beneath all that weight. Where a passage went wrong, I could bring it back by working a little gouache into the watercolour, which turns it opaque as you add it.
And bees are full of strange truths. A drone hatches from an unfertilised egg, so it has no father at all, only a grandfather, and its whole purpose is to carry the line forward. The hive it belongs to is less a swarm than a single creature made of thousands, one that renews itself and never quite dies.
A lacewing, named for how it felt
The lacewing is the bee's opposite in every way. A friend found it on a wall and sent me a photograph, and I loved it so much I had to paint it, in the thinnest washes I could lay down, until the insect was barely there and the painting with it. Drawing the creases and the faintest lines of the wing in white gouache is one of the most beautiful things I know how to do. I called it Neuroptera spectralis because it felt spectral, ghostly, almost not there, and the name holds that feeling. It is a real lacewing. Only the second word is mine.
A leaf insect I gave a wing
I saw the leaf insect somewhere once and loved how it moves, and the way it can disappear into a leaf in a second. But the fine white lines on its deep green back were too beautiful to leave out, so I painted them in, and gave it a wing to carry them. Mine can fly. The leaf-shaped ones cannot. And because I had changed what it is, I could not honestly keep its real species name, so I called it Phyllium imaginarium.
How to read the names
So anyone who reads the Latin is reading my honesty. I learned with the bee that I can go fully scientific when I want to, render a creature exactly as it is, and I loved that. But I will always love to invent as well, and in time the Specimens may hold perfectly accurate insects and entirely imagined ones, side by side.
The name is a record of what I did, not just a label.
Why I paint them on white
I treat these three as a study of nature, in the old tradition of the painted specimen: painstaking detail, on white paper, so the creature is the only thing that matters. If I laid them on black, the black would become the subject, the way it does in my cabinets. Here there is nowhere to look but the insect itself.
They were painted before Green Lush, my dense green garden, and they have wandered into it since. Look closely into that tangle and you will find them among the leaves, alongside a few others who have not yet stepped out on their own. In time, some of them will.
Living with a specimen
The originals are small, no bigger than a hand, and that is the wonder of them, all that detail held in twelve or thirteen centimetres. As prints they ask to be hung where you pass close, alone or gathered the way a cabinet of curiosities gathers its small treasures. Each is an archival fine art print of the original watercolour, colour-matched and proofed by my own eye, on the same paper, made to order and ready to live with, the print only, in the size you choose.
What you would be living with is a piece of nature most people never slow down to see, and yet, the bee above all, the very thing the rest of life leans on. That is the whole of it. A small, overlooked, essential creature, painted as closely as I could see it, and made to last. The collection is here, in Specimens.