The Orchid Mantis Enters the Chat

Over the weekend, I found myself in conversation with a close friend’s daughter, whom I hadn’t seen in at least five years, which is one of those sentences that makes time feel both fake and a little rude.

You expect a child you haven’t seen in ages to be taller, certainly, and perhaps marginally less sticky. You do not necessarily expect to be launched, almost coincidentally, into a conversation about orchid mantises.

And yet.

She began talking about them with the kind of bright certainty young adults sometimes have when they’ve discovered something both wonderful and deeply strange, which is honestly the best possible way to encounter any creature. Not through a textbook. Not through a grim educational poster in a school hallway. But through the delighted urgency of someone saying, essentially, have you heard about this bizarre tiny being, because it is incredible and I need you to know at once.

If you are unfamiliar, the orchid mantis is exactly the kind of organism that makes you suspect the natural world is showing off. It looks like a flower and an insect collaborated on a dramatic costume and then got a little carried away. It is beautiful in a way that is almost suspicious. Too elegant. Too improbable. Like something designed by a moonlit committee of ghosts, botanists, and theater people.

Naturally, I became obsessed.

I have always had a soft spot for things that live in that delicious space between lovely and unsettling. The garden is full of them, if you pay attention. Blooms that smell faintly of death. Seed pods that rattle like curses. Vines that behave as though they’ve taken a personal interest in structural collapse. An orchid mantis feels perfectly at home in this company. It is one of those creatures that seems almost invented—too ornate, too specific, too committed to the bit.

So of course I did what any reasonable person would do: I immediately began trying to make art about it.

This is, I think, one of my favorite ways for a piece to begin. Not with a grand plan, not with a market strategy, not with me solemnly deciding to “explore a concept,” but because someone said something strange and beautiful and it lodged in my brain like a burr. Suddenly I was looking at orchids differently. Suddenly I was thinking about camouflage, delicacy, danger, moonlight, petals that aren’t petals, and the general treachery of beauty.

That’s the magic of conversation, isn’t it? Especially conversation with someone younger, who hasn’t yet learned to act as though wonder should be rationed. Adults are often terribly committed to pretending that the world is ordinary. Young people are much better at reporting back from the frontier.

And the truth is, I need those reports.

Lately, so much of adulthood seems to involve logistics. Shipping labels. Meal planning. Email. Laundry in various emotional states. Very little about daily life encourages a person to drop everything and contemplate an insect disguised as a flower. But perhaps this is exactly why we should. Perhaps the continued survival of the human spirit depends, at least in part, on occasionally becoming derailed by a gloriously weird mantis.

So I started working on a piece.

It has orchids, obviously. It has mood. It has moonlight, because nearly everything in my artistic life eventually wanders under a full moon. It has that tension I’m always chasing—the place where something is lush and beautiful but just a little uncanny. The place where the petals are soft, but something in them is watching you.

I don’t know whether the final piece will fully capture what I loved most about that conversation, which was not simply the orchid mantis itself, but the act of being reintroduced to astonishment by another person. But I’m trying.

And maybe that’s the real gift of moments like this. Not just inspiration, though that’s lovely. Not just a new painting idea, though I’ll certainly take it. But the reminder that the world is still full of marvelous and improbable things, and that sometimes all it takes is one conversation to knock open a little hidden door in your mind.

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be over here thinking about orchid mantises and trying not to fill the entire house with increasingly specific references to “floral predation” and “petal-based deceit.”

Art, as always, is proceeding normally.

May your flowers be beautiful, your predators impeccably dressed, and anything wearing a tiny crown be treated with appropriate suspicion.

-G