This was a quick sketch for the heroine of what will eventually be a series of paintings. The paintings will be a series of narrative still lives about bees, life, death, and war. I've been collecting objects over the last year: new, antique, natural, and handmade...to be assembled into compositions for the narrative to play out against. The queen (in the above sketch) is represented as a human, with her head and neck covered in a white-porcelain shell. The tentative title of the series is "Tangle: The We That Wage."