Day 2 - Owlet moths and sketching attempts

 June 29th 2025

I found this beautiful Spirama spp moth on my window sill on my late father's birthday - June 24th.  The ancient Greeks believed that moths carried the spirits of the dead, who visited their loved ones.  That is me looking for a connection.  Science shows that these Erebidae moth sightings go up in June, and so too my sighting.

It was dark, past 9 at night, and I was about to shut the window to keep you-know-who out, when I saw this creature.  We both startled each other, and as I gasped in wonder, it flew into the room and fluttered about in panic.  I turned the fans off, alarmed that it would fly into the fan and meet a horrible death, and it slowly calmed and sat on our white walls, when I got this picture.  

What a beauty, is this where our kalamkari artists got their inspiration from?  Lok at the beautiful border design and those lovely "eyes".  

Next morning, he was still there, though on a different wall.  I opened out the windows, and as I sipped my coffee, he (from the markings I have decided it is a male, I may be wrong), kind of fluttered out, in an uneven zig zag flight into the cooler morning air.

Now on the evening of the 29th, Abhishekha Krishnagopal, a young artist and ecologist kicked off the nature journaling journey for Monsoon Beauty 2025, and I dipped in and out of her webinar.  She made us use circles and squares and draw fruits and flowers with those circles.  "See?, wasn't that easy?", she would sweetly say.  Here at home, I grunted and rolled my eyes, oh yes indeed.  Easy for you to say, not for me who has been traumatised by biology drawings since childhood.

The point that she made was also that when you sketch, you notice textures and aspects that you do not usually.  You appreciate the insect, flower or tree that much more.  

So I decided to give the moth with the soul and the eye a sketching shot.  I did notice and appreciate the way the forewings and hindwing arranged themselves/. I noticed that they eyes were like inverted commas.  I noticed the thorax in-between the wings.  And I noticed that single outstretched leg.  

  

What do you say, appa?  Pass or Fail?  😁

23rd July update.

Van Gogh painted a beauty

Giant Peacock Moth by Vincent van Gogh

From the VanGogh museum

In May 1889 Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, 'Yesterday I drew a very large, rather rare night moth there which is called the death’s head, its coloration astonishingly distinguished: black, grey, white, shaded, and with glints of carmine or vaguely tending towards olive green; it’s very big. To paint it I would have had to kill it, and that would have been a shame since the animal was so beautiful.'

Later he decided to paint the moth after all, using his drawing as a model. Van Gogh called it a 'death's-head moth' and depicted a kind of skull on the back of its body. It was actually a giant peacock moth, however – a species that has only stripes there.