yellow jackets

& a painting in which they do not appear

I have a long history with yellow jackets. They’re extremely common in Texas*, both outside the city (rendering the woods, in my opinion, completely uncampable–not to mention the ticks & chiggers) & in suburban yards, & are called by authorities “aggressive and dangerous” because they will sting unprovoked & even repeatedly.

When i was a little kid, they terrified me (whenever i got stung, my mother put baking-soda paste on the stings). Later, i took perverse pleasure in attacking them (firing a hose up under the eaves, where their paper nests tend to be found) then smashing them on the ground with a broom.

In 1985 i had scheduled a one-man show of paintings, & i asked my best friend Jill if i could use her studio, which was a ramshackle screened shed in the backyard (i was living in a tiny rented room at the time). I had a builder make me the biggest frame that would fit in my car (a small station wagon)–i think it was close to 2 meters long–& gave myself just 30 days** to make a new picture for the show. I went out there all day every day. I soon discovered wasps had built a nest high in the corner. I knew that if i disposed of it, they would just build a new one in a different corner–they’re like that–& i’d be wasting too much of my time fighting insects instead of working.

So i had to teach myself to move so slowly that they wouldn’t know i was there. It was a bit nerve-wracking, but also Zen. (And quite hot: July & i couldn’t use fans because there was no electricity.) I ended up drawing a fish-eye-lens kind of image of the canvas, the easel, all of the studio behind it (including a wooden airplane propeller unaccountably suspended from the ceiling, a window (with added flames outside), & myself in the process of painting it (in the form of the classic Sensory Homunculus). On the image of the blank canvas was the beginning of the drawing of the picture itself. I called it “Blasphemies of the Dwarf Jester” & JR Compton bought it from me after the show.

–At this current house for us in Plano, a couple of years ago, we had a yellowjacket problem too, the first summer we moved in. This time i tried something pacific–first, cotton balls with drops of peppermint oil, pinned to the doorframe; & then “decoy nests” (brown paper bags made ball-shaped & suspended from the eaves, to make the wasps think this territory was already claimed by another bunch of wasps. And it worked.

Just remembered my jr high school football team was the Greiner Yellowjackets.

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*which is blessed with more than its share of stinging insects (including a horrible furry larva, quite venomous, that likes to wait camouflaged on tree limbs for a kid to put his hand on it, known in my childhood as “asps”–a name straight out of the Bible, just like we called cicadas “locusts”–ha ha!). I found a guide (attached), which is also one of the few pictures i could find to show the characteristic silhouette of the yellowjacket in flight, with its legs trailing down (they always make me think of a jellyfish, for some reason)–invariably performing the sort of looping arcs that dragonflies also use, as if forbidden to travel in a straight line.

**using a special recipe of oil paints calculated to be dry in time for the opening. (I remember the main ingredient [hard to find then; impossible later] was “Venice turpentine”, or sap from the larch tree.)