UnCommon Fly
Artist: Shoosty® Year: 2023
Medium: Duplex Printed Ink on 18mm Silk Twill
Size: 50” x 50”
A beautiful imaginary fly art ready for a new page in Linnaeus’ taxonomy of animal classifications.
In art history, you will find flies featured as motifs for centuries. Flies have been used in paintings to represent both positive and negative qualities, such as realism, illusion, death, decay, and corruption.Shoosty® says his uncommon fly represents beauty through technology, it is a marvel of chromatic engineering with a touch of whimsey.
Flies have been associated with realism and illusion in paintings of the past, especially in trompe l’oeil works that create a visual deception of three-dimensional objects on a flat surface. Flies have been used to demonstrate the skill and creativity of artists, and challenge the perception of the viewers. One of the earliest examples of this is the anecdote of Giotto and the fly, recounted by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists (1550). According to Vasari, Giotto painted such a realistic fly on the nose of a figure by his master Cimabue, that Cimabue tried to swat it several times before realizing his mistake.
Flies have also been used to symbolize the transience and fragility of life, as well as the inevitability of decay and corruption. An example of this is The Fly, by Louise Moillon (1635), a still-life painting that shows a basket of plums with a fly resting on one of them. The fly suggests that the plums are ripe and sweet, but also that they will soon rot and spoil.
UnCommon Fly is an exercise in vector graphics and chromatic sciences, as it uses advanced techniques throughout. The artist is intentionally pushing the boundaries of art and technology, yet the composition remains playful and captivating, with eyes that draw attention and wings that embrace wonder.
