Beneath a canopy where daylight survives only as rumor, a congress of poison dart frogs takes the forest floor, each jewel-bright body burning against the green dark like an ember that refuses to go out. Crimson, cobalt, tangerine, and a green lit as though from within scatter across a tangle of palm fronds, fallen timber, and the patient gold of woodland mushrooms. These small amphibians of the family Dendrobatidae, native to the rainforests of Central and South America, wear their colors as warning rather than ornament, for the most formidable among them carry toxins once harvested by indigenous hunters to anoint the tips of their blowgun darts, the very custom that gave the family its lasting name. A small felicity of language attends the scene as well, since the proper collective term for a gathering of frogs happens to be an army, kin to the murder of crows and the parliament of owls. A host of these creatures becomes, quite literally, an army of dart frogs, and the title tips its hat to Sam Raimi’s 1992 cult film Army of Darkness, that cheerful marriage of horror and slapstick. Begun on my last day at the Akron Zoo and carried to its finish only this week, the work holds something of both the menagerie and the deep wild, a remembered humidity pressed into pigment. Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches. Available.
