San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
In second life as art, butterflies just as bold
Like the butterflies in her paintings, Lucy Peveto found a new life at the end of a familiar one.
For the Alamo Heights artist, it was retiring from her work as an attorney to focus full time on her abstract and floral work, a coalescence of colorful acrylics, pastels and gold leaf under resin with smatterings of real iridescent butterfly wings that once fluttered through the Amazon.
Those paintings light up San Antonio’s AnArte Gallery, as well as the rooms of private collectors. But they also highlight Peveto’s love of butterflies, both alive and dead, as colorful metaphors for life.
“That’s why I got into butterflies,” she said. “I got tied up into the idea of transformation.”
While it’s not a common medium, preserved butterfly carcasses have been used in art since the Victorian era. Sometimes large, colorful species are mounted as the central subject in a piece, while other works feature hundreds of butterfly wings arranged in motley patterns.
Many species of butterfly appear to be living works of art. Fixing them to a canvas or putting them under glass preserves their beauty but also raises ethical questions about mortality and Mother Nature.
Butterfly taxidermy artists such as Peveto, as well as her suppliers, stress that they never harm or kill butterflies for art, and that their use of the dead insects illustrates the importance of their preservation.
“The No. 1 thing we can do for butterflies right now is raise awareness and education,” Peveto said. “If I can use them and extend their life (beyond) a couple of weeks as art, I think that’s a good thing.”
Like most artists who work with butterfly taxidermy, Peveto gets her specimens from special suppliers, who in turn get inventory from butterfly farms around the world.
Those farms are mostly small, family-run operations in tropical regions of the world, such as Indonesia, Madagascar and other locales around the equator.
“We need large amounts of popular butterflies in consistent quality and size, which only a farm can provide,” said Joseph Rudy, owner of The Butterfly Co. in Chicago, one of the leading suppliers of dried unmounted butterflies and insects.
Since 1977, The Butterfly Co. has served artists and collectors, as well as researchers and universities.
Rudy said the taxidermy butterflies he and most other reputable vendors sell are never hunted or captured in nets and killed. Rather, butterfly farms simply sell their butterflies postmortem, usually off the enclosure floors after the insects die. The butterflies are then dried naturally and placed in paper envelopes.
Those butterflies live purposeful but brief lives.
“Most are probably only going to be alive for a couple of weeks as an adult,” said Molly Keck, an entomologist with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service in Bexar County. “Their purpose is to reproduce. Once they reproduce, then their adult purpose is over.”
Keck said plenty of people collect butterflies for study and art, and she’s never heard of any ethical concerns about butterfly farms.
Nevertheless, the use of real butterflies in art has sparked controversy.
In 2012, British artist Damien Hirst riled animal rights activists when he incorporated hundreds of live butterflies into a retrospective, where the butterflies would emerge from their pupae and die days later in the exhibit space. The installation was a nod to his first solo exhibit in 1991, which also featured real butterflies, alive and dead.
Hirst and the Tate Modern gallery in London, which held the 2012 retrospective, defended the butterfly exhibit by saying the insects were known to thrive in such created conditions and they simply lived out the final stage of their natural cycle in the installation.
Most artists wait until that final stage is complete before incorporating butterflies in their art.
Rudy, owner of The Butterfly Collector, also is a butterfly taxidermy artist. He said the use of dead butterflies in art dates at least to the Victorian era, or almost 200 years ago, though insect shells and bodies have been used in dyes and paint pigments for hundreds of years.
Rudy said only about 30 to 50 of the 17,500 butterfly species in the world are used in taxidermy art.
Those include warm-hued specimens such as the tailed orange and bright yellow buttercup butterflies of the Americas. Then there are the more vibrant exotics, such as the luminous Morphos from South American, the blood-red glider butterflies of Central Africa and the downright psychedelic sunset moths of Madagascar.
Rudy said most butterflies in taxidermy art sell for about $5 to $15 each, though the cost can range from $1 apiece to hundreds of dollars per specimen. The Butterfly Co. sells a single, superrare Morpho cypris from Columbia for $1,200.
Peveto works primarily with Morpho butterflies, which cost about $5 to $20 each and come in rich whites and deep blues and purples.
The most Peveto ever spent on a single butterfly was $275.
“Some of the more expensive ones aren’t even that pretty,” she said.
The long second life of butterflies in taxidermy can be credited to good bones, specifically on the outside.
“Insects have an exoskeleton, so their bones cover their body, so they look identical to how they were alive when they are dead,” Keck said.
She said butterflies’ beautiful colors come from the thousands of tiny scales on their wings, as opposed to the pigments in their bodies. Since these delicate wings are part of a butterfly’s exoskeleton, they can be preserved for many years.
One of the oldest known pinned butterfly samples in the world dates back to 1702.
“I have collections from the 1950s that look like butterflies that were flying right now,” Keck said.
Some of the oldest butterfly taxidermy art in San Antonio can be found inside Hung Fong Chinese
Restaurant.
The Broadway fixture houses several framed works, each featuring hundreds of butterfly wings arranged in exotic patterns.
The mosaics include blue and purple winged butterflies arranged in psychedelic patterns, as well as portraits of parrots.
There’s even a bannerlike work that reads appropriately: “Pictures worth millions of butterflies.”
“When you actually look up close and see how difficult it is to make something like that, it’s pretty amazing,” said Kenneth Huey, great-grandson of the late K.A. Huey, who founded Hung Fong in 1939.
Huey believes the Hung Fong butterfly art has been in the restaurant since the late 1970s, when his grandparents brought the works over from a butterfly farm in Brazil.
Rudy said such farms play an important role in conservation.
A single female butterfly lays several hundreds of eggs, but only a handful make it to adulthood in the wild. In an enclosed butterfly farm, however, virtually all will survive.
Those living butterflies may be sold to clients, such as zoos or wedding planners, but many are released into their surrounding habitats to grow native butterfly populations.
“The farms really do good work,” Rudy said. “The family farms are small, but they do need to preserve large swatches of habitat around the farms (and) preserve native areas.”
The better butterfly farms and butterfly taxidermy suppliers are regulated by local governments, he added. The Butterfly Co. is licensed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and pays fees that go toward conservation work around the world.
“It’s a very regulated industry,” he said. “Those are the costs of doing business ethically and legally, and we’re happy to do it.”
Like Rudy, Peveto also hopes more people see butterfly taxidermy art as a celebration of both the insects’ relatively short lifespan and its enduring legacy as one of nature’s most beautiful creations.
“Like the transformation of ourselves and our own lives and our own journey, I want to extend the butterflies’ lives through the artwork,” she said.