Michael Anthony Simon’s Spiderweb Paintings

The artist prefers to work with the golden silk orb-weaver, known for its great circular webs.

Eight years ago, the artist Michael Anthony Simon, then thirty, was living in Chicago and feeling complacent, creatively. So he moved to South Korea. “I wanted to isolate myself, close the studio doors, see what happened,” he said the other day. What happened was that, after settling in the city of Gwangju, he found himself wandering out of the studio and into the woods, and painting on leaves and spiderwebs—canvases, of a kind. The only traces of these variegated apparitions, once the elements had done them in, were photographs. “This whole thing of making bronze statues to last five thousand years—if everyone did that, there’d be no space left,” Simon said.

Still, he wanted to take his art inside. He began catching spiders and putting them to work in his studio. After experimenting with different species, he settled on the golden silk orb-weaver, known for its great circular webs. “I’d get them started, and then I’d leave for the night,” he said. He’d fabricated triangular pedestals with three acrylic rods rising vertically from the points. With a stick, he’d place a spider atop one of the rods, convey it to the next rod, and then to the third rod, and finally back to the first, to complete the triangle. After that, the spider was on her own. (He employed only females.) “Some of them have personalities,” he said. “I’m not kidding. Some are, like, Where would you like this? Others are, like, Fuck you, I’m outta here.”

In the morning, he’d return to find elaborate new lattices. He gathered up the spiders and put them back where he’d found them, outside. Then he spray-painted the webs. Sometimes he left the painted webs attached to the rods—when they collapsed, maybe after a couple of years, he’d collect the detritus in a signed plastic baggie, or else he’d make collages with the fragments. Sometimes he removed the web paintings from the rods and hung them on the wall. “I like the ridiculous nature of the project,” he said.

Last spring, Simon, on a bender in Seoul, fell and banged his head. In the following days, his vision started to deteriorate. At first, it felt as if someone were turning up the lights, as if the world had been bleached. He began wearing sunglasses at night. Then he lost the ability to focus; though he could distinguish things on the periphery, the center of his vision, as it were, was gone. A blood test in September revealed that he had Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition caused by a rare genetic mutation. In just eight weeks, he’d become legally blind. Living in Korea was impractical. In October, he moved back to the U.S., to a basement apartment in his brother’s house, in the suburbs of Denver. He boxed and shipped twenty unpainted webs to Colorado, so that he could continue his spider work. His latest thing, though, is working without color. He has a new series of paintings of polar bears in blizzards.

He was in New York recently, to visit an exhibit of his old painted webs at Apex Art, a SoHo gallery. He stayed in Koreatown, and one snowy day went out searching for a pot of kimchi-jjigae, a spicy stew that suited the foul weather. Living in Asia had infected him with a sneaker fetish: he avoided puddles in order to protect his laceless Onitsuka Tigers. He had a black beard and, under a wool cap, a shaved head. He made eye contact—a vestigial reflex, perhaps—and had a beatific vibe. At a restaurant, he took photographs of the menu with his phone and enlarged them on the screen, which he then held inches from his nose. “One of the seven deadly sins this condition has helped me with is pride,” he said. He ordered in Korean. Some young Asian women seated at the next table took note.

“This is the first time I’ve spoken Korean in four months,” he said. “I learned to read and write Korean in three or four hours from YouTube. The actual speaking part is a different story.” He was finding it almost as hard to adjust to living in the U.S. again as it was to get used to being legally blind. “I’m an independent guy, but I know I need help,” he said. “I’m still figuring this out.” As far as working is concerned, “it just takes longer. It’s alleviated a lot of bullshit, because I can’t see it!”

In his peripheral vision, he caught sight of something on the wall. A bug, yes. He smiled. Fruit fly. ♦