of moths and men

Magritte had a thing for clouds and hats. Picasso's passion was the Minotaur. Dali, sex. Warhol, well...everything.

Joseph Scheer's obsession--at least for the last few years--is moths. Pesky, sweater-eating moths. Scheer is an artist. He's also an associate professor at Alfred University in western New York State--not a professor of entomology, mind you, but of printmaking--and a co-director and founder of the university's Institute for Electronic Arts.

"The taboos of moths are quite interesting," Scheer explains via phone from his home studio, surrounded by large-format digital prints of the little buggers. "They're mostly creatures of the night that fly directly into the light."

Scheer began his artistic odyssey in early 1999 by initially collecting any insects flying into his office at Alfred. Because the joy of flight amazes him, he first had the notion of staging an installation dedicated to "things that fly." His idea was to capture images of the bugs on a high-resolution scanner and immortalize their likenesses in digital portraits. After just two weeks, he had collected 500 different species. His first scan was a gnat--which you might say is an even more bizarre artistic subject than a moth.

But of those 500 species, moths soon piqued Scheer's interest the most. They're "quite prevalent in Allegany County," he says. "And they're always very colorful, with interesting patterns." Three years later, he has close to 20,000 specimens, not including those that he abandoned during that first year of perfecting his technique.

His process is relatively straightforward but painstakingly laborious. Obsession comes in handy here. He mounts each of those 20,000 moths onto a board to dry. When ready for their close-up, he places several at a time directly onto an 8200 dpi Creo EverSmart Pro flatbed scanner, which he and a colleague modified to make the background out of focus and bring the subject more into focus. This gives the already three-dimensional images an illusion of floating in space.

To date, lie's scanned about 10,000 to 12,000 of them. The images are saved as a CMYK TIFF file, so detailed that each file ranges in size from 190 to 400 megabytes. (In total, he has roughly 3 terabytes (or 3,000 gigabytes) of moth data, stored on 3,000 to 4,000 CD-ROMs (he's lost count), 30 DVDs, 20 120-gigabyte hard drives, and 40 40-gigabyte backup drives.)

Scheer gives each of the scanned images the full Photoshop treatment, color-correcting the scan against the actual specimen. He corrects the color again on the Creo Iris 3047G printer to ensure the prints replicate as closely as possible the essence of each individual moth, to which he refers at each step along the way. After these many hours of work for each specimen, the final portrait is then printed on 34 x 46-inch Arches fine-art paper.

All his hard work creates dramatic results. People are as drawn to the captivating portraits as, well, moths to a light. They are as vibrant and stunning as any you'd find in the pages of National Geographic. In fact, they were in National Geographic--the May issue. They've also shown up in such places as museums in Switzerland, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and China's equivalent of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Next stop: natural history museums from Atlanta to Boulder to Houston. There's also a luxurious art book due on the coffee table next spring, printed in China on Oriental paper with traditional Chinese binding. Could a film be on the way? The New York State Council on the Arts recently gave him a grant to make the project multimedia by capturing video and sound of the moths in action.

In the meantime, his obsessive collecting continues. Even though his collection represents more than a thousand species, he's planning to explore Costa Rica during an upcoming sabbatical to capture some more exotic varieties.