Noctiluca as Flower. Oil on gessoed paper. ©Liz Ewings 2020

This week I am painting oil sketches of plankton in the style of flower paintings. Planktonic organisms drift with ocean currents because they can’t swim fast enough to escape them. Jellyfish are considered plankton because they drift. Krill are plankton. Barnacles and fish begin life in the plankton. Some planktonic organisms are photosynthetic like plants. I thought the plant/photosynthetic plankton parallel would be interesting to paint.

Things have taken a weird turn because I ended up with a Noctiluca sample last summer. Noctiluca, are dinoflagellates, single-celled organisms that engulf and consume other organisms, especially phytoplankton, which can live inside them symbiotically. Their color comes from the their food, in this case probably diatoms.

Does this remind anybody of land plants at all? Dinoflagellates are not plants. They don’t even do their own photosynthesizing. So this painting is of a diatom-enslaving amoeba with two spinning tails. But it looks like a flower.