As a child, I found an iridescent flower beetle. For a brief moment before I recognized it as an insect, I thought I had discovered a gemstone. Its surface appeared mineral and metallic, and its color shifted as it moved and caught the light. That momentary confusion between a living organism and a mineral became the starting point for the series. The Living Gems series investigates how color emerges through the interaction of biological structure, light, and viewpoint. In many beetles and butterflies, microscopic structures in wing cases and scales interact with light, causing color to shift as illumination or viewpoint changes. Their appearance is vivid and specific, yet never entirely fixed. The paintings enlarge these insects to a scale at which the surface becomes landscape. The centered, symmetrical compositions recall natural-history plates, while the shift in scale gives each insect the presence of a portrait. Reflections, metallic transitions, and abrupt chromatic changes are reconstructed in carefully defined zones of color. Each image preserves the insect’s anatomical specificity, while its surface appears fluid, architectural, and continually changing. The series asks how a fixed painting can represent a changing appearance. Each work holds one arrangement of color while suggesting that another could emerge with the slightest change in light or viewpoint. Iridescence turns perception into an event: color appears not as a stable attribute, but as a temporary relationship among organism, illumination, and observer.
