Travis Louie, Miss Emily Fowler and Her Giant Spider, 2015, acrylic on board, 20 x 24" • Sold
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During Oscar Pennington’s many travels, he had come across dozens of tales about gigantic spiders. Most of the stories were explained as false sightings, like the time in South America where he investigated a giant tarantula sighting that turned out to be the product of someone’s poor eyesight and active imagination. A missionary thought he saw a large hairy spider in the trail that turned out to be two hairy monkeys entwined in some physical activity. When he heard that they were reports of a giant hairy spider in England he scoffed at the notion but later discovered the stories to be true. Miss Emily Fowler of Hampstead Heath, secretly kept a very large spider as a pet. She claimed that the enormous arachnid started out rather small, that it came from her father’s travels to Costa Rica, and that it crawled out of one of his shipping crates. As it grew too big to be unnoticed, she housed it in a horse barn on her family’s property for 20 years. When it passed away, she set up a tent and put the dead spider on display. People paid a small fee to have their photograph taken with it. |
