Decorating With Ants

Last October I wrote a post titled “Salvador Dalí and Me.” Dalí is my favorite artist, and I have been obsessed with his work for a long time.

If you know anything about Dalí, you know that he often has ants in his paintings. There are ants crawling on faces, swarming on clocks, marching over the landscape. Virtually everywhere are ants. They are one of his many reoccurring themes.

My great grandparents built a house in the ’50s and after my great grandmother died, my grandparents moved into that house. They lived there until 2005 when my grandfather became too weak for my grandmother to care for.

That house was filled with a lot of memories for us. Unfortunately, we were not the only ones who visited. There were often ants in the house no matter how meticulously my grandmother cleaned, she still could not get rid of them. They were big black ants. Huge. The bane of my grandmother’s existence.

After she and my grandfather went to live with my aunt and uncle, everyone assembled there for one of our infamous family reunions. Some of us were perusing the shops in Frederick, Maryland when we happened upon these very life-like black ants with magnets. We bought several for my grandmother, as a reminder of the house she had to leave behind.

Grandma Bernie was not amused with her gift, but I fell in love with the ants and went back the next day to buy all of the ones they had remaining in stock.

They remind me of Dalí’s work. Since I bought them, they have moved from house to house to apartment with me and ended up here at the Cape of Dreams. I have used them to decorate fans, pipes, refrigerators, basically anything that they could stick to.

They currently adorn the fridge.

I left one in the box that it came in. I think that makes it look like a specimen from a lab.

In 2011 I was in Philadelphia with some of my family and found ants made of recycled spoons in an art gallery. They were rather expensive, but I had to buy at least one.

It has traveled around the house as well. Here is is over the stove last November.

Currently it is climbing up one of the wine crates I use as shelving.

Last year for Christmas, my sister bought me another ant. This one is made of cast iron and is heavy. 

I love her as well, and she joined her friend on the wine crates.

There is no saying where the ants will end up next. I am tempted to paint some crawling up a wall. What do you think? Would that be going overboard?

Happy Homemaking!