Żabka (Hypnotoad)

Live painted at Gratifly & Arise Festivals, summer 2014. Toads are amazing creatures – ancient, metamorphic, sturdy, adaptable. Their habit of consuming the skin they shed has made them an especially potent image for transformation. The most potent animal toxin comes from a frog (batrachotoxin, from Phyllobates terribilis); the most powerful hallucinogen does as well (5-MeO-DMT, from Bufo alvarius). Amazonian tribes use the secretions of another species (Phyllomedusa bicolor) as a ritual purgative to purify themselves for hunting. (This "kambo" ceremony renders people temporarily and inexplicably immune to the shock of electric eels.) My great inspiration Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term "ecology," is also famous for saying that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" – meaning, the development of individual organisms is a kind of re-enactment of their whole evolutionary history. We all start out as single cells, then grow into worm-like creatures, then fish, and so on...humans do this in the womb but frogs and toads go through their transformation out where everyone can see. Perhaps that is part of their enduring mystery and appeal. Certainly it resonates with my own open-studio process as a live painter, letting everyone observe the work unfold in public.