Month: September 2020

This is an 8 x 10 painting. The Queen Conch shell is one I have owned for years!  Conchs were used by the Haitians to summon voodoo spirits.  The Florida Keys were a major source of Queen Conchs until the 1970s, but harvesting them is now prohibited.  The cone snails are not friendly fellows.  They have over 100 toxins in their body and the venom is similar to curare, used by natives to make poisonous arrows.  There have been over 30 recorded cases of death by cone snail. For more information about this painting click here.

This is another 8 x 8 canvas panel that would go quite well with the painting shown last week!  The animals that inhabited these shells are commonly known as sea snails and part of the phylum Molluska in the animal kingdom.  These creatures evolved about 500 million years ago and there are more than 100,000 known species.  There is no definitive catalogue of all of them yet. For more information about this painting, click here.