The Crab's Eyes of Barbados

This wonderful little painting of Ruud Janssen's suggests to me something that it probably should not: the crab's eyes of Barbados. The crab's eyes is a plant that grows on that island, and this little painting reminds me of those red-eyed plants. The glossy seeds of the plant would entrance me when I was a boy, and I would collect handfuls of them and consider how similar they were to the eyes of crabs themselves (which were all around me: land crabs living in holes at the upper ends of beaches, fiddler crabs living in the brackish waters of estuaries, sand crabs living at the very edge of the water, and various nameless crabs living safely under the Caribbean sea rolling out like an aquamarine carpet to the horizon). Strangely, I had no idea until tonight that the seeds of the crab's eyes were so toxic.


Ruud Janssen, 05-089 (9 April 2005)
un violon d'ingres