Laura's Art Blog, Exploring the Material World

One of my favorite beekeeping books is “Toward Saving the Honeybee” by Gunther Hauk. Mr. Hauk writes about honeybees in a detailed and poetic way. Here’s what he has to say about beeswax (my painting medium):

“Beeswax, the product of an animal that has been considered sacred in almost every culture throughout history, is indeed a very special and precious substance. It has been used with great reverence in many religions for ceremony and ritual. The aesthetic beauty, the fragrance, and the multitude of uses that beeswax offers to man are in themselves accomplishments. The bee, in its simplest acts of life. reveals to us a constant stream of wondrous synthesis, industriousness and transformation.

Whereas other types of bees and wasps use materials from nature to build their combs (living plants, earth, old wood), the honeybee alone creates the substance for the comb in her own body, out of her bloodstream. We can marvel at the significance of the bees’ nourishment, which is the nectar of flowers – the finest of substances produced by the plant. This sap or nectar results from a unique combination – a synthesis – of physical substances (mostly oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen) together with that cosmic force that enables all life on this planet: light.

It is this purest and most ennobled of food substances that the bee ingests, assimilates and converts into bee ‘substances’, including blood. Just as our bones crystallize out of our bloodstream – (beautiful to observe in the growing embryo) – so the bee’s blood is transformed into wax that is ‘sweated’ out in thin, wafer-like, almost translucent white plates on the underside of her abdomen…”

- Gunther Hauk

I’m reading “The Book of the Courtesans” by Susan Griffin. You’d love it. It’s a sparkling history of courtesans jam-packed with tales of gumption, wit and style. AND they’re accompanied by some highly readable art criticism too. In other words, great fodder for artists. Here’s a quote on beauty.

“Although conventional wisdom tells us that courtesans made themselves beautiful in order to attract wealthy men, the reverse was also true. Many sought wealth precisely because they wanted to create and possess beauty. Given the profundity of the experience, it is no wonder that regardless of circumstance, whether female or male, educated or not, we all seek what is beautiful.” – Susan Griffin

I want to create and possess beauty too.