Artist John Knuth made use of houseflies and their disgusting traits and habits to create a series of paintings that don’t look quite as bad as we’d expect housefly art to be.
Houseflies taste with their feet, making use of chemically sensitive hair called chromoreceptors. So this means they do a lot of walking on their food. On the same note, the flies can only eat liquids. So if they land on a solid they want to have for dinner, they simply vomit on the food, covering it in digestive juices and preparing to get it liquid enough for their eating.
Making use of such wonderfully endowed characteristics of flies, John Knuth decided to use them to work canvases.
The flies were kept in a cage lined with canvas and fed colored sugar water. They had their share of the colored water, and then of course as they moved around, they would walk on the canvas and leave marks of color on it. The artist employed about 250,000 bees to get this job done, and disgustingly as they did it, the canvases turned out to be fairly well.
