The Bug Sur series brings insect forms into dialogue with symbols drawn from mythology, history, politics, and ritual. Their bodies become structures in which biological form and human systems of meaning intersect. Bilateral symmetry, mirrored repetition, and frontal presentation organize many of the compositions, giving the insects the presence of icons, ceremonial objects, masks, or heraldic emblems. The title joins “bug” and “surrealism” in a play on Big Sur, linking the project’s biological surrealism to the California context in which it developed. Iridescence plays a key role in the series. In many insects, color shifts with light and viewpoint. Iridescent and metallic pigments allow the painted surface itself to change with illumination and the viewer’s position, carrying some of this optical instability into the work. Gold extends the connection between natural and cultural surfaces. It links the jewel-like appearance of insects to historical uses of gold in sacred and ceremonial imagery, from ancient Egyptian objects to Byzantine icons, where luminosity was associated with value, power, permanence, and sacred presence. Across the series, insect anatomy is combined with symbols drawn from different periods and cultures. Mythological figures, political emblems, and ornamental motifs alter the meaning of the organism, while the insect’s morphology changes how those symbols are read. These encounters allow the insect to move between nature and artifact, organism and symbol. Bug Sur explores how beauty, symmetry, material surface, and cultural memory can transform a living form into an image charged with meanings far beyond its biological identity.