The weather is warming and our camellia tree has bloomed so well this year! The flowers have been exploding for a few weeks now, and along with the warming weather life reawakens in the undergrowth. The chaotic webs of the black widows can be spotted now in half a dozen places without looking too hard.

I've grown up with black widows all my life, you learn to spot them fast, I grew up fearing them a bit. They seem to want to build a web where ever hands need to go. I've seen some real goliaths too, webs 12 feet long vertical holding mature females that would challenge what wiki says is their average size. Most everyone I know in CA has run into them and has a black widow story.

Black widows are not the biggest or the most venomous spiders, they wouldn't break any records for anything really. Other countries even have similar types of spider that are more aggressive (I'm looking at you Australian Redback).
I think it is their iconic shape, the glossy black and the long thin hooked legs, the glint of red from the hourglass. The way they seem to come from nowhere and seem to be everywhere, they just really got under my skin as a youth.

Over the last year or so I've started to appreciate them a little more. I'm not sure why, probably they're a little easier to live with because their behavior is so predictable and their webs are so easy to see. They are also super successful predators that mostly keep to themselves.
Did you know they change color through their life time? Adolescent females have a very different color pattern that's really pretty I think. I started noticing these last year and thought it might be a different species of widow but they just weren't fully grown yet.

I have a few black widow designs in mind but I wanted to start here because it felt like the best fit for this time of year. A widow climbing up toward a camellia blossom, symbolically climbing toward the warmth of spring. Spring always makes me feel like I'm emerging from a cave as the world comes back to life from winter.

This piece is a 5”x7” piece of 1mm thick copper made in spring of 2023.
Frame included.
Shipping invoice will be calculated separately.