The Gift of the Spider

The Spider and I

There’s a peculiar irony in how often tarantulas are mistaken for spiders. They are, of course, spiders in the taxonomic sense, but in temperament and reputation they belong to a different order of mystery altogether. While most people meet spiders with a slipper, I once met them with affection. In some dusty chapter of my distant past, I found myself deeply involved in the odd and mesmerising world of tarantula husbandry — a phrase that sounds like a gothic marriage but mostly involved feeding crickets to creatures that looked like sentient wigs.

At one time, I owned over thirty of the beauties: rose-hairs from Chile, cobalt blues from Myanmar, pinktoes that clung to glass like airborne kittens. I’d mist their enclosures each morning as though blessing them, watching the droplets form constellations on silk. People thought me mad, of course. (‘Why keep spiders?’ they’d ask, as if keeping cats were somehow more rational.) But there was something serene, almost contemplative, in observing those quiet predators — creatures of poise and patience, existing in a stillness that mocked our human fussing.

Perhaps that’s why John Kenn Mortensen’s Have a Spider struck such a peculiar chord with me. Although I generally detest the modern and post-modern art world — where chaos is often mistaken for creativity — this image stopped me cold. It reminded me not of fear, but of fascination; of the delicate line between dread and devotion; of those long-ago nights when I would sit by a terrarium, half expecting to see some small black miracle spin a sermon on the vanity of man.

And so, for once, I accepted the spider offered to me — this time not from a tank, but from Mortensen’s strange and sinister imagination.

The Gift of the Spider

There are very few works of modern or post-modern art that don’t make me want to throw myself into the nearest ornamental pond. The avant-garde, with its obsession for shock and shapelessness, has become the art world’s version of an unattended toddler — sticky-fingered, loud, and utterly convinced of its own genius. And yet, every so often, something creeps out from under that gaudy heap of conceptual rubble that makes me pause. John Kenn Mortensen’s Have a Spider is one such curiosity — a small, ink-scratched miracle that whispers where most modern art screams.

Mortensen’s work feels like an echo from a darker nursery rhyme, as though Edward Gorey had been left too long in a Scandinavian winter. Here we have a little child — barefoot, bewildered, and standing before a stone wall — offered a spider by a clutch of ghoulish figures whose elongated beaks and bony fingers resemble the ghosts of plague doctors or politicians. (And really, is there much difference?) They loom with grotesque politeness, all hunched decorum and hollow charm, extending their ‘gift’ as if bestowing grace upon the gullible.

There’s something deeply theological in that gesture. Evil, after all, rarely barks. It bargains. The Devil doesn’t come roaring through the door with horns and sulphur; he offers you something — small, curious, almost endearing. A spider, perhaps. Mortensen seems to understand that the most frightening exchanges in life occur not in the haunted house but at the garden gate, under the civilised pretext of neighbourly concern.

The child, for her part, isn’t screaming. She simply looks, holding the spider as though unsure whether to crush it or cradle it. Here, innocence isn’t ignorance — it’s curiosity poised on the brink of corruption. There’s a fine line between wonder and temptation, and Mortensen captures that moment with eerie precision. We might call it the birth of discernment, or perhaps the death of simplicity. Either way, it’s the human condition distilled into ink and yellow paper.

The composition, too, plays its own moral allegory. The wall divides the world neatly into two realms: the civilised stone and wood of human order, and the barren wasteland of leafless trees beyond. The figures, belonging to that desolation, lean over as if drawn by envy — or perhaps duty. They’re priests of pestilence performing a grim liturgy: Take, eat; this is my spider.

The use of cross-hatching gives the scene a texture both intimate and oppressive, like the engravings of an illuminated manuscript rewritten by a mad monk. Every line writhes with tension. Even the negative space feels alive, as though the air itself were thinking unpleasant thoughts. Mortensen’s technique is a lesson in what the moderns forgot: that the smallest image, rendered with conviction, can contain a world. One need not erect a steel monolith or submerge a crucifix in urine to provoke reflection — just a pen, a scrap of paper, and an imagination that remembers fear.

What strikes me most is how restrained the horror is. These creatures could be cackling demons from a medieval apocalypse, but they behave like genteel old uncles at a tea party. Their menace lies in their manners. That’s true of most evil, I think — it knows its cutlery.

There’s also a sly comedy in the whole exchange. The title — Have a Spider — is delightfully absurd, as if one were offering a mint or a biscuit. It reminds me of those childhood phrases our elders used to say with cheerful menace: ‘Don’t be shy — have a go!’ or ‘It’s only a little bite!’ Every horror story worth its salt begins with a polite invitation.

Mortensen’s art fascinates me precisely because it does what the old masters did — it shows instead of shouts. It doesn’t need to explain itself in a manifesto or a museum label longer than the Magna Carta. It understands that the truest terror lives in understatement, in the soft suggestion that something isn’t quite right in the garden.

I still detest most of modern art. But occasionally, amid the noise of neon and nonsense, something like this crawls out — quietly, confidently, and with all the grace of a spider on the hand. And one can’t help but take it, trembling slightly, and say, ‘Thank you.’

Art is the spider’s web on which civilisation catches its own reflection. Most of it glistens for a moment, then collapses under the rain of fashion. But every now and then, one thread — thin, patient, spun in silence — endures.

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