Butterflies

Butterfly blue

Cistus flower

Collage is sometimes a starting place for my screen print ideas. I like the random nature of selecting pieces which don’t appear to go together and not thinking for a while. I wanted to do some screen prints about life cycle, beauty and decay.

Inspiration came from trips to the butterfly house at the Horniman Museum. In the humid atmosphere you can see hanging pupae waiting for the butterflies to emerge. The wings of exotic blue, orange and yellow wings flutter above your head. Apparently most butterflies only live for a few weeks, what would they do in that short time?

The quote in the prints comes from a poem, Nothing yet, everything already, "the fragile cistus flower in the morning if it flew away from the refuse, all heady that the yellow and blue butterfly, companion to the cistus, perish at the tip of the heart," by the French poet Jaques Dupin.