My dad was an entomologist. In layman’s terms that means he studied bugs. To be more specific he studied bees and wasps. He taught biology at a small liberal arts school in the midwest where I grew up. Growing up around the biology department of a university is probably the best thing I can imagine for a kid, especially a smart, quiet, awkward one like myself. There were snakes and turtles and mice and rats and fish and things preserved in jars and big glass cases filled with pinned bugs and charts and books and it always smelled like old coffee, all of the adults were nice to me, and being smart was a virtue. I got to tag along on lots of trips into the countryside to collect insects. My dad, accompanied by several grad students, would net and scoop from ponds and forests to count populations and do, at least from a kid’s perspective, the exciting part of biological research.
For a long while bees have wandered through my art. I like bees and wasps. I know that a lot of people are afraid of them, but I understand that they don’t really want to hurt me. Stepping on one is surely painful, but imagine how the bee feels. I like it when they buzz around my head because it makes me think of my dad. The part of my brain that quietly cobbles together the allegories in my paintings is probably also the part that is convinced it’s some kind of a visitation. Most of the rest of me is… let’s say a deeply skeptical agnostic, but even if someone only lives in your memories, that’s still some kind of an afterlife. Being reminded of someone that you love and miss, regardless of any deeper connotation about the universe and living this life, is surely something to be grateful for. And so maybe I put a bee in this logo because it reminds me of something deeply good from my life, or is a bit of hopefulness in a body of work that is admittedly oftentimes fairly dark. I’m not going to claim that I absolutely remember what I was thinking when I made it, but as often happens when I let things play out in their own way I end up with something that means a great deal to me.