The Honey Paintings

In conjunction with the Bonita Museum, I am guiding a group of artists to each create a painting on rice paper, which is biodegradable. We will use honey as paint. These paintings are made for our local ants. Each painting will be laid out on the ground as an interactive installation for the ants. Each artist will share photos or video of the ants interacting. The honey painting is incomplete without the ants. 

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This project will be initiated on 6/24/23, as part of an exhibition event from The Biology Through Art group founded by Dr. Maxwell. At this event, I will share my Urban Succession work, unveil The Lizard Lounge constructed for the patio of the Bonita Museum, and run a free workshop for anyone interested in participating in the Honey Painting project. Meanwhile, several other artists & biologists from our group will be sharing their work. It will be a fantastic event that I will share here on this page.  ​

Here are a couple prototypes. I did one of a maze, as that sounded like a fun experiment.
​I did the other as a self portrait. 
​It was surprisingly easy to paint with honey!

Next, I found an outdoor area to place the honey paintings. I chose locations where I already saw ants, however I suspect a honey painting could possibly be planted almost anywhere and attract ants. They may likely also attract other organisms. 

Here are videos of ants in the art. I believe these are Argentinian Ants.  

I look forward to adding YOUR 3-5 second videos of ants interacting with your honey painting here. It will be fun to try to identify the species of ant too!

The event at The Bonita Museum went great! Here are some photos of people creating Honey Paintings!

This submission came from Brent Shannon on June 25th, 2023:

Small, very fast moving red ants came to enjoy the art.

This one from Rowan Chase has two parts:

​Part #1

Part #2

Jose Espinoza shared this documentation of a bee lapping up his honey painting:

Here's one from Sloan 7/26/23:

This submission came from Denae Senise on June 28th, 2023:

Denae says, "No ants just slugs!"

Here is one from Sage: