Interlude - The Wasp

It's taken a while for me to get into the swing of the new Ecuador painting. There are so many different things to include, and so many different colours to mix for it, that it's been very "stop and start". After working on it for days it didn't look as though I had done much more than a couple of hour's worth.

To make myself feel better I painted this quick study of a dead wasp. At 6 x 6" it's a very small painting, but it has a certain amount of rhythm and energy; qualities that I love in a painting.

Over the past few months I have been visiting the National Gallery a lot, partly to improve what little I know of Art History, but mostly just to get fired up. On a recent trip there I spent some time looking at Botticelli's "Venus and Mars", one of my favourites in the collection. It was the wasps buzzing around Mars' head (just visible on the extreme right) that stuck in my mind and triggered my sketch. Once I had found a subject, and glued it to a bit of card (!), I was away.

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