Cicada (Chicharone)

The cicadas (Chicarone in Spanish) fascinated me the first time I saw them which was here in South Texas. The word “chicharone” captures something of their droning horn sound in the heat of summer afternoons, and their electrically charged blasts at eventide. Hated by many, but loved by me are their stupendous chorales for they sing always in unison and with an incredible precision. Their evening service begins precisely when the setting of the day kisses the dawn of night. It is a precarious moment and brief, and in our climate, I can see the precise moment of change in the light and feel the slight cooling down in temperature. At the beginning of this moment, the chicharones sing out in praise perhaps of their Maker. But it is the sheer beauty of these stubby creatures, their broad bodied airplane bodies with their dark sunglasses, cockpit eyes that fascinate me most of all. The design of their coloration and the motor-like vibration they set off in your fingers, should you hold one, is from the world of a child’s toy, mesmerizing. 

Supposedly they spent seventeen years underground dressed darkly as beetles. Then they emerge and cast off their suits of armor and perch for hours in highly visible places in the morning sun to dry their wings. It is at this time that I have most often studied them in their most visible, helpless, and vulnerable moment, when they are easy prey for all that feed upon them. Now this is where my fascination- chicarone might have stayed had not my dear friend, colleague, mentor, fellow artist, the man who brought me here to teach, Ben P. Bailey Jr. suddenly died.

My painting came, I realized after I did it, out of my grief-stricken memory for Ben. I had not planned the work specifically as a tribute but it came out of my feelings at the time of his passing and whenever I look at it, I think of him. Much art has been born this way. How would I paint my feelings about the cicada, I had often wondered? What design should it have? It has so many wonderful angles and shapes. But now it jelled. A vertical, an ascension from the earthly to the heavenly, from colors of the earth to those of the energy filled sky, from the desiccated shell of the grave to the full youth of the colors of life.

If the cicada had our human brains, could they imagine from inside their clunker-heavy, ungainly beetle bodies groping in the darkness of the earth, their incandescent ascent, their resurrection into brightly colored winged beings ascending into the sapphire of heaven? “O’ ye of little faith, think on these things.”