Some of the Curio Folio paintings may have contained embellishments, I admit that, so for this one it had to be 100% true. When I was in Barbados in 2002, I saw a hermit crab walking on the beach, inside of a Samsung smart phone instead of its usual shell. You can see in the painting, which I did from memory, the crab had entered the charging slot as a baby, then grew to be a full-sized hermit crab using the smart phone for protection. The interesting thing was how the crab had selected a screen-saver of a snail shell, which is one of its natural source of shell. It seemed that the image of the shell was the preferred choice of the crab. I also saw it send text messages, although in a language that I could not recognize, perhaps it was crabbish, that is the name of the language that hermit crabs use to communicate with each other. They normally do it with clicks of their claws, and a low frequency 'clucking sound' like that of a giraffe. The crab scurried off into a pile of rocks and I never did see it again, although now and then I get strange text messages in what appears to be crabbish.
Curio Folio: Crab Phone, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, August 2025
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