Californian artist creates portrait with 200,000 dead ants!

London(ANI): A Californian artist has created a portrait of his younger brother by using 200,000 dead ants.

Chris Trueman decided to immortalise his six-year-old brother Bryce dressed in his cowboy outfit by suspending ants in resin.

The 31-year-old said afterwards he wanted to make people question their attitude to killing creatures - but stopped half way because he felt so Guilty for taking so many lives.

"It took several years, not because of the actual labour, but because at one point I started to feel bad about killing all of the ants and I stopped the project for over a year," the Sun quoted him as saying.

"Then I decided that the first ants would have died in vain if I didn't finish the work so I decided to continue."

 The artist confessed that he tried to catch his own ants but it proved impossible.

So he found a firm online which farms ants for lizard food and ordered 330 pounds tubs, each filled with 40,000 of them - alive.

He then poisoned the ants by putting them in sealed bags along with cotton wool balls soaked with nail varnish remover.

"Ants ride the line of what we consider intelligent life."

"If we see them in the kitchen, many of us think little of killing them all. If we take the time to look at them they are remarkable creatures.

"I wanted to create a situation in which condoning the process would be fuzzy, where the criticism I may receive for the intentional killing of 200,000 ants would be tempered and measured against each individual's own actions towards the insects," he added.

The portrait was put on sale in an art gallery for 23,000 pounds and has been sold for an undisclosed sum.