:quality(85)//cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/KN527AWYZET7W2W27NMHTBSYE4.jpg "New York muralist sets out to hand-paint 50,000 bees")
Por Matthew Green
LONDON, Feb 4 (Reuters) – Like many artists, Matthew Willey wanted to meet his muse. He had no idea that he would fly in through his apartment window.
The bee that entered his room in late spring 2008 so captivated the New York muralist that he embarked on a mission to highlight the growing threats to pollinators by hand-painting 5,000 bees on buildings around the world.
Having depicted more than 5,500 of the insects in 30 murals and installations over the past five years, Willey says the shared experience of the coronavirus pandemic has made people more receptive to the sense of interdependence it seeks to evoke.
“From depression or addiction to climate change, ocean plastic pollution and systemic racism, it is our choice to separate all of these interconnected problems into fragments that make them harder to solve,” Willey said.
“A bee is always considering the well-being of its hive. It is programmed that way. But humans are programmed to choose. So we must choose to see how connected all our problems are,” he added.
He was once primarily involved in painting murals in nightclubs, sports venues, or luxury homes, but in 2015 he painted his first bee mural on a 1920s-style building in LaBelle, Florida. Passersby began donating money, food, and coffee to help her 10-week project.
Since then, Willey has sent dancing bees to schools, museums and municipal buildings from San Diego to Washington DC. In October, he completed his first international project at a school in the south of England, after a 15-year-old student wrote to him after discovering the website for his Good of the Hive project.
With bees and other insects facing pressure from pesticide use to habitat loss and climate change, Willey hopes that planned projects from Italy to India will lead more people to rethink their relationship with nature and with each other.
“I am not painting bees. I am painting us,” he concluded.
(Reporting by Matthew Green. Edited in Spanish by Lucila Sigal)
–
