The Conversation

I began painting watercolors on postcards on board a cruise ship, and, almost without exception, the postcards reached their addressees and were stuck on refrigerators. The postcards are too absorbent to make good watercolors, but I'm not a good painter, so the postcards are good enough. The reasons for painting the postcards were (1) to spend time with what I was seeing and (2) to make a record of it to share with friends. I had found from previous trips on which I took lots of photographs that they meant very little to me after the trip, and they certainly meant nothing to my friends. Hardly anyone wants to see the snapshots from your vacation. One stupid little watercolor, on the other hand, doesn't make much claim on anyone's attention.

In the summer of 2009, I spent two months teaching English at a school about an hour by train east of Seoul. My students were between the ages of 7 and 16. One of the classes I taught was Insects. Because it was summer and we were in the country, we had plenty of insects. There were so many dragonflies in the mall of the campus that I could hear them buzzing even from inside the buildings. I asked the students whether insects were good or bad, and we began to construct complex sentences. A girl of 13 or 14 said that dragonflies were bad, so I asked her why. She said it was because they are scary; so we incorporated that notion into a very long sentence: "I don't like dragonflies because they are scary, but dragonflies are good insects because they eat mosquitoes, which are bad insects, because they suck your blood and carry disease." My students' English was pretty rudimentary, even after several years of study in school, so it could take half an hour to achieve sentence formation. The rest of the class was spent in drawing an insect on a piece of plastic that was shrunk in a toaster oven and attached to the students' cell phones. Not much English in that, but they got a souvenir of summer camp.

I got in the habit of picking up dead insects and bringing them back to my room, where I drew them on a postcard and painted them quite badly. If you want to render the wings of a butterfly or moth realistically, you need an awful lot of skill. Still, I got very absorbed in my task. A moth that you might think of as nondescript, when looked at closely, may have delicate patterns on its wings, which can look like a lunar landscape or like galaxies exploding.

The dead insects began to decay rapidly in the warm, humid climate. In the case of butterflies or moths that had finished their brief life cycles, their wings were usually tattered. The luna moth I found had lost its long tails. Some had been squashed. These were the specimens I chose rather than the perfect specimens that collectors prefer. The Italian phrase for still-life is natura morta, and I wanted to paint the insects as they were in death. Here are half a dozen postcards.