SPECIMENS

The Specimens are single insects, each one alone on white paper – the old language of natural history, where the subject is set down with nothing around it, nowhere to hide, every detail accountable. The empty white asks one thing of you: look closely.

The Latin name underneath is an honest contract: it tells you exactly what I did – whether I kept the creature real, named it for a feeling, or invented it outright.

Apis fratris is the kept-real one, and the apex – a male Buckfast bee, anatomically exact, painted from life over four days among my own flowers, in honour of the bee and Brother Adam, the monk who bred it. Neuroptera spectralis is real too, but named for how it struck me: a lacewing so faint it seems barely there, laid down in the thinnest washes I could manage, almost nothing on the paper. Phyllium imaginarium is the invented one, and the name admits it – a real leaf insect, but mine has a wing the living ones don't have, so I couldn't honestly claim the true species name. A beautiful forgery, signed as one.

All three came out of the same place: the garden of Green Lush, where they lived among the leaves before I ever lifted them onto the bare paper.

A photograph could catch any of these in a moment. These took the opposite – a hand choosing every hair, every wing-vein, every grain of pollen by eye, the original of each no bigger than twelve or thirteen centimetres. That is what you are really looking at: not the insect, which a camera renders better, but the attention itself, the kind almost nothing is given any more.

Real, named for a feeling, or invented: each one tells you the truth about itself. Every one is available as a fine art print.