I noticed Otto Marseus van Schrieck ‘s still life in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; he used real butterfly wings on his painting which over the centuries (it was painted in 1673) have degraded and now leave the ghosts of butterflies without their original iridescence. The capturing, painting and preserving of a once live thing and how it is presented to us now seems particularly relevant to this series. A really interesting blog about how he painted using this technique here by Hamilton Kerr students at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
