In my Concepts Class our final assignment was to chose an artist from the Saatchi Gallery website ( [link] ) and respond to it.
Well... It's a contemporary art website, so it took me forever to find an artist that I would actually like to respond to since I'm not really into contemporary art.

I chose Zhang Xiaotao, a Chinese artist. C:
I mainly responded to this piece of his~ [link]
I was drawn to his concept, which you can read if you click on the link but to sum it up...Basically he used ants to demonstrate how tiny we are in comparison to the universe and he wants to give everyone a feel of "going on forever" and claustrophobia.
In his other painting he brings the human down to a grotesque parasitic level.

So when I started thinking about my response, I was thinking of insects that are similar to humans, or how I could compare them.
I thought about bees and how amazing it is that they use geometry to make perfect hexagonal wax molds to store their honey.
Thinking about geometry and honey made me think of Egyptians, who had honey and used geometry to build the pyramids (it's so freaking phenomenal).
And then I related the Queen bee of a hive to a Pharaoh.
I did some research on Queen bees...

I decided to have the dead Queen bee in crystallized honey shaped as a pyramid, since the Queen is pretty much the "mother" to every bee in the hive, and all of them depend on her for their existence (since the worker bees don't live nearly as long as she does, and she's the only one who can create them and who can create another Queen bee before her passing) and since Egyptians buried their Pharaohs in tombs, erm, pyramids, yeah. xD

The bees are gathered around the Queen, to sort of show that they are praising her. (even though someone in my class thought they were eating her... -__-;;)

Another reason why I chose bees is because a lot of people fear bees.
I wanted to show how such tiny creatures have the same kind of values we do, and just the fact that we are all very small and powerless when it comes to natural events such as death, and that the universe is larger than we can fathom it to be.

The reason why I have the other two honey-pyramids there is because the actual three pyramids in Egypt were placed in the shape of Orion's belt, a constellation of which Egyptians thought was the center of the universe.

The reason why the sky and ground are complementary colors is I wanted the golden color of the ground to stand out, and also I wanted them to be separate in a way that the ground is earth, us on our planet; the sky is the rest of the universe, or more like the afterlife that the Queen is being sent to (pyramids for the Egyptians were shaped like rays pointed to the sky to help send them to their afterlife)

I think I covered everything. x'D
Tell me what you think.

Painted with acrylics on a large masonite board.
This looks a lot better in real life. u.u

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