Wednesday Wonder: John Knuth's Fly Paintings

Today's Wednesday Wonder features Los Angeles artist John Knuth's unusual fly-created paintings, which he calls watercolors. The artworks (you will be forgiven if you put quote marks around that word) are made of fly regurgitation, which Knuth obtains from houseflies he feeds a mix of water, sugar, and watercolor pigments. Kept in Knuth's studio in special containers with canvas walls, the flies spit up their speck constantly onto the surface of Knuth's canvases. Over the course of a work's creation, the marks build up into dense layers of abstraction. You be the judge of the unpredictable results!

Watch the video to see how Knuth makes his fly feed and employs the insects (more than a quarter-million to date) — certainly among the most unusual of artist assistants —  to create his paintings. (Additional images are here.)

Knuth offers some of his abstracts on Etsy.

My thanks to Dazed Digital where I first saw the video.

John Knuth on FaceBook and Twitter