"Self-Portrait With Gun" by Chris Trueman
What's so interesting about the grainy painting above by San Francisco-based artist Chris Trueman? It's not the image of his younger brother as a little kid in a cowboy outfit holding his dad's rifle - instead, it's what he used to paint it: ants. More specifically, 200,000 dead ants.
How does one go about getting 200,000 ants? David Moye of AOL News tell us:
"I found a guy who raises ants and sells them as horned lizard food," he said. "The lizards need the folic acid. It's an artificial food source. If the lizards were in nature, they could get them from their own diet, but many of these lizards are kept as pets in cities like New York and San Francisco where they are hard to come by." [...]
True to the theme of the painting, Trueman said the idea of ordering the ants was different than when they actually showed up.
"The ants arrived in a large peanut butter jar -- just this huge mass of rising ants," he said. "It was weird. I couldn't set them free. They weren't native to the area and if they bit someone, they would leave welts, and I couldn't feed them, so I had to kill them."
Link | Chris Trueman's Website
But when he manages to create a coherent picture with live ants, then he'll have something.
I'm just curious how he killed them.
"The ants arrived in a large peanut butter jar -- just this huge mass of rising ants," he said. "It was weird. I couldn't set them free. They weren't native to the area and if they bit someone, they would leave welts, and I couldn't feed them, so I had to kill them."
He did this by sticking cotton balls soaked in fingernail polish into a bag holding the ant-rich peanut butter jar.
"They'd die in a couple of minutes and then I'd sprinkle them onto a flat piece of Plexiglas," Trueman said. "Some ants would break apart because they were dried out, and others would be in their full form."