01 · Relax
The specimen spends 12 hours to 3 days in a humidity chamber until its joints move again. Rush this and the wings snap.
The studio
About
The Painting Pisces started in 2019 with a jar of dead bees on a windowsill and a growing suspicion that throwing them away was the wrong response.
What it is now: a one-person studio in Asheville, North Carolina making sealed shadow boxes around ethically sourced butterflies, salvaged wings, painted bone and flora dried by hand. Every piece is a single original. There are no prints, no reproductions, and nothing is made twice — partly on principle and partly because two butterflies are never the same shape.
The work sits somewhere between an entomological cabinet and a tarot card, which is roughly where my interests sit too.
How a piece happens
Four stages, mostly waiting
02 · Set
Pinned to a grooved setting board, wings drawn forward behind the veins, weighted with glassine, then left alone for up to two weeks.
03 · Compose
The ground layer is painted, aged or torn; the flora is laid out dry and moved around until the eye travels the way it should.
04 · Seal
Spacer, UV-filtering glazing, hardware, then a continuous dust seal across the back. Signed, dated and annotated with the species.
Why this, of all things
On finding death decorative
People sometimes ask whether this is morbid. It is a fair question and the honest answer is that it is roughly two thousand years less original than it looks.
A skull on a shelf, a butterfly under glass, dried flowers that will never open again — these are the oldest decorative vocabulary in Western art. The Romans put a skull and a butterfly in the same mosaic. Dutch painters built entire careers on beautifully rendered rot. The Victorians wove their dead relatives' hair into brooches and thought it tender, because it was.
What I make sits in that line. It is not a statement about death so much as a refusal to pretend that a beautiful thing stops being beautiful once it has stopped being alive.
Where I stand
Five commitments
Farm-raised only
Every whole specimen sold here was reared in captivity and died of natural causes at the end of its adult life. No wild-taken stock.
No Appendix I, ever
No CITES Appendix I species is stocked, offered, or accepted for commission — regardless of what someone is willing to pay.
Nothing wasted
Damaged specimens become wing work rather than going in the bin. Some of my favourite pieces started as a loss.
Conservation materials
Acid-free throughout, stainless entomological pins, UV-filtering glazing. The cheap versions of each cost about two dollars less.
Documented and repairable
Species and origin written on the back of every piece. Anything made here can be reopened, treated and resealed — write to me.
Honest about limits
I buy through wholesalers and have not stood in the flight house. Where I cannot verify something personally, I say so.
Come and say hello
Commissions, questions about a piece you already own, or just to send me a photograph of something you found on a windowsill.