Tomaselli’s Times: The noted artist finds visual poetry in the news.

Oct. 4, 2009, 2012. Gouache and archival ink-jet print on watercolor paper, 10⅞× 8½″. (collection of kim manocherian, new york.)

Fred Tomaselli has been busy slaughtering mosquitoes this past summer, or so I am given to understand one afternoon when I visit with him in the spacious walk-up studio he occupies in a converted small-industrial building in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. I have come with the intention of talking about an entirely different recent passion of his: the vivifying, that is, of dead newsprint.

But first back to the mosquitoes, because in fact he is killing, collecting, and cataloguing the insects in question. Every morning he inventories a fresh batch from the bowels of the high-tech German mosquito-catching machine he procured from an entomology mail-order outfit and methodically lays out the night’s harvest gridwise across a paper towel and photographs the results. “You can toggle through them,” he exults, full of boyish nerd marvel, riffling through the photos. “Look, July 18, just a few days ago—122 mosquitoes! I admit it, I’m a complete autistic taxonomist when it comes to trying to figure out and understand the shape of the world. But in addition I just love gloating over the corpses each morning—I love being able to reverse the bloodfest.”

What I love about the story is its dailiness (“Oh yeah,” Tomaselli agrees, fanning out the prints, “this is like my diary.”) and its ritualized nature (“Absolutely. I am very much about rituals; it’s probably the lapsed Catholic in me.”). Both are qualities that go all the way back to the mornings of his very first job as a news paper-boy, rubber-banding the papers and setting off on his bicycle to toss them across the tract front lawns of his hometown subdivision in Santa Ana, California, the rising sun casting its long shadows in the very lee of Disneyland. “No doubt about it,” Tomaselli avers, “I’m a news junkie to this day—I just really get a kick out of watching the history of the world unfold on a daily basis.”

Junkie, perhaps, being the operative word there, for the other thing Tomaselli famously was in those halcyon days of his Southern California youth was an avid enthusiast of variously mind-altering drugs and plant extracts. Nothing too over the top, but he was hardly a mere piker, either, and the experiments left their lasting perceptual residue: a way of seeing the world in the fullness of its swirling dips and whorls. Indeed, the suburban-bred Tomaselli suggests that the drugs are what first turned him on to nature. By the time he was building toward his bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing at nearby California State University, Fullerton, he was spending a good deal of the rest of his time tending a small-scale backyard marijuana operation. “In order to hide my crop,” he confesses, “I built up this border of tomato and other vine plants all around the edges, and gradually those borders became even more interesting to me than the stuff they were intended to hide.” He doesn’t know about other people, Tomaselli likes to say, but for him marijuana proved a gateway into gardening.

And that love of gardening, in turn, prefigured a love of birding and birding books. “Birding actually started for me a bit later,” he explains, “one day when I went birding with my brother. I mean, before that, birds were just like, what, dirt in the sky; I had never paid much attention to them. But I had the binoculars and all of a sudden I see this little thing and I focus in on it—it’s this brilliant little orange, yellow, and black creature clinging to a branch—and I look it up in the book and go, ‘Western tanager!’ And I realized that I was understanding something about the environment that I had never understood before. It was really fascinating to me, this idea of...