The Bug Sur series brings insect forms together with symbols drawn from mythology, history, politics, and ritual. Their bodies provide a structure in which biological form and human systems of meaning meet. 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 combines “bug” and “surrealism” in a play on Big Sur, tying the project’s biological surrealism to its California origins. Iridescence plays a key role in the series. In many insects, color shifts with light and viewpoint. Iridescent and metallic pigments carry some of these shifts into the paintings, where the surfaces themselves respond to illumination and the viewer’s position. 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. In these traditions, 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.