The Giant Bee

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The Giant Bee

The beast was about 3 inches long, I could see its yellow-black stripeyness fuzzily tickling my chest.

Yes, I awoke to find a giant bee crawling on my chest.

I’d fallen asleep on the sofa, listening to music. 9.pm now. I lay there trembling, feeling the beast`s legs move across my chest.

Peggy was there. She was sarcastic, I shouted “Peggy, there’s a giant bee on my chest.”

No response.

“Peggy,” I shouted again, there’s a giant bee crawling on my chest.

Peggy laughed, "well I’m sure its not even half your size" She was referring, I think, cruelly, to some slight weight gain that I have sustained in the last few months.

When we first met I was turned on by Peggy’s sarcasm and unkindness, especially when we spoke about my career as a portrait painter. We were at a party to celebrate the opening night of an poorly written and performed play, and she had said with a smirk, "I’m sure you’re going to be a great success, the next Michaelangelo," and laughed. This was an especially ignorant joke given that Michelangelo never painted a single portrait, but it nevertheless succeeded in being annoying and flirtatious: we made love that night, and I forgave her, as I was to do many times thereafter.

“Peggy, you bastard,” I shouted, ‘It’s a giant fucking bee, get the fucker off me!”

And she laughed again, “Haha, you big baby”. So it was with tremendous courage and force of will that I had to shake the thing off myself, it fell heavily to the floor, I leapt up, got a kitchen knife, and in one swoop cleaved  the monster’s thorax from its abdomen.

I knelt down to in inspect the beast- it was huge; oddly some limbs kept moving after detachment- most alarming. I’ll probably have nightmares about that for some years to come, detached bee parts visiting me in my sleep.

Peggy came in then, as I was kneeling there, “you turned Muslim or something, honey. Think Allah will save you from the killer bees?”. “Oh ha ha, Peggy, more wit.” But she was drinking coffee and munching toast and totally nonchalant, perusing the TV programme, not seeming to care in the least what I thought.

Myself, I got the knife and lifted the two sections of giant bee onto an atlas which was leaning against the sofa, and which I’d been looking just before I dozed off (looking at Finnish lakes, to be precise) and I went up to Peggy. and said, “Here. Huge..”

“Eah,” she said, not bad, “They are showing "The Lord of the Flies” tonight, the original.”

Well, that is my Peggy. All sarcasm and unhelpfulness. She is originally from Oklahoma.

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The Garden City

The first prints of the new series have dried, and I'm showing them on Flickr.

They're called "The Garden City", as a sort of homage to the planners of the nineteenth century.

I've structured the pieces with an underlying grid, with circles and other shapes overlain.

Some confident works

Here are some of the better ones- there have been some very weak prints too. Howver, I think the weak ones are somehow "necessary". Without them it wouldn't be possible to make the good ones.

Big Prints

This brings to a close the first really large series of prints I've done, at 60 x 85 cm.

The bigger size brings specific problems, as follows.

a. the plate is much more cumbersome, so it's harder to move it, and move round it
b. It's harder to make changes.
c. It takes much longer to change designs.
d. Mistakes in design and errors of technique are exaggerated.
e. It's much harder to place the paper on the plate to print.

The extra costs are actually ofset by the fact that one makes less work.

I'm mainly happy with the results. I like grandeur in art, I think it's a neglected quality, indeed it's a quality that post-modernism seems to millitate against.