The bee paintings come with a twelve year, unexpected story, briefly told. 

Mary Woltz has dedicated much of her life to keeping honeybees. Her work on behalf of their health and survival is unwavering, and yet in the winter of 2010, an entire bee yard of my wife's was killed by someone who poured gasoline into four hives. The inexplicable and wanton killing of the bees left us in grief. The idea of their encircled doom consumed me. 

Four bees paintings dominated my studio time the following year. Three began concurrently and a fourth set aside. Preliminary studies were made for "the queen and her workers". It and the other two, however, were swept up in my frenzy to picture their death, each a super organism consisting of perhaps thirty thousands late fall bees.  My bound canvas was imagined as their enclosed home. It was less clear how to express their demise and harder still to deal with the persistent anger I felt. Eight months later, the canvases were set aside, in part to escape the experience. The resolution of the artwork, individually and serially, lacked assurance, however.  

Through the act of making, I understood the subject of the paintings and the series needed to exceed their death and our sorrow. I didn't want their story and our hearts to be defined by apparent darkness of the undertaking. The blank fourth canvas had subject and title - forgiveness - before such feelings were thought possible or knowing what form the canvas would take. 

Freed from confronting of the preceding paintings, I took up the fourth. The effort was enjoyable. Though the bees remain the painting's subject, its forms are disentangled, released through (and into?) a different state, not the one that beset them. Forgiveness was completed that year. The others would unexpectedly reemerge much later.

My 2016 trip to Poland included a day at Auschwitz, the infamous setting from the Holocaust during World War II. The series of assemblages entitled Benennen followed Poland in the way the bees paintings followed the experience of their death. The first ordeal was partial preparation for the second, as visitor and as artist. The visit to Auschwitz brought on an unplanned examination and adjustments to the paintings in a desire to increase their emotion depth and pathos. 

The third period of work on the paintings occurred in 2023. I left my workspace of six years, formerly Bill King’s studio, after his wife, Connie Fox, died. The largest studio of my career allowed me to view the bee paintings side by side for the first time. Fresh questions arouse, refinements completed, and reordering made of the three canvases in consultation with Mary. The fourth, Forgiveness, lives separately in North Carolina, undisturbed.

The paintings, entitled The Killing of the Bees, have never been exhibited together. The website provides a semblance of doing so.