This painting was inspired by our entomology class field trip to a desert research station located in the Mojave desert at Zzyzx, about a hundred miles south of Las Vegas. It is dedicated to my teacher and advisor Dr John Hafernik of San Francisco State University. He is depicted as a buckeye butterfly wearing a baseball cap, surrounded by screw bean mesquite. My fellow graduate student is at the lower left, Dr Gene Hannon (aka Gene the dancing machine) who studied damselflies.

The overall image is that of a glass collecting jar we use to gas the insects that we captured. The jar has a plaster and cyanide base that kills/asphyxiates our prey after a bit. Then, we identify and pin them for our studies. You can see a tiger moth, a short horned grasshopper, a backswimmer, a velvet ant and others all laid up, upside down at the bottom of the jar.

There is also the landscape that we traversed. There was Kelso dunes with primroses and stink beetles walking casually across scorching sands. Plus spiny flat horned lizards who specialized in eating ants. There was clustered spreading mounds of pungent creosote bush, and white tissue paper like fragrant datura on the sides of the road. We drove on a highway crossed by thousands of sphinx moths on their ancient migration paths; some larvae were smeared, others made it out alive. We paused at a dried up, white, alkaline soda lake, where tiger moths were at the edge, emerging from holes with buzzing speed. At the research station itself, there were California fan palms with full voluminous skirts of dried up leaves, and sandy washes with blazing stars.

Last but not least in the picture, there is an odd bug looking dude staring back at you. Its got a pair of cactus eyes – comprised of a round hedgehog cactus and an opuntia flat pad of a nopale. The appendages hanging off the eyes are the handles of insect nets, held on the left by a blister beetle that does not fly, and on the right by an ichneumonid wasp with a long egg laying device coming out of its abdomen called an ovipositor. At the tip top of the bug dude’s head, between the two eyes, near the bipinnate leaves of the mesquite, is a tiny third eye common in insects. It is a simple eye called an ocelli; it is useful in sensing light and dark, and in the function of daily rhythms.