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Spring Soccer (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil and ink)
OK…today features two more wacky sketches from my little book. I promise I will have a different topic tomorrow and not keep putting up these oddities! Here is a children’s soccer game which I drew in a park in Chinatown in spring. I wish I had captured the NY Chinatown flavor of the afternoon better—there was a very strange older lady loudly singing idiosyncratic songs in Chinese and passing out leaflets while two older gentlemen accompanied her on traditional musical instruments. However whenever I chanced to look in their direction, they certainly noticed, and sketching them was out of the question. Don’t worry, I gave them a few coins for the serenade and they seemed delighted!
Inner Shamanism (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil and ink)
I also drew the peculiar chemical factory innards of a mysterious shamanistic beast. Unfortunately I don’t really know what else to say about the surreal little pastiche…but it certainly features a jaunty-looking squid (although my favorite part is the magenta sky filled with ephemera).
We’ll get back to history, crowns, and/or furry beasts tomorrow!
Funny Sketch of Giants (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
This year, I have been carrying a small sketchbook and some colored pencils around with me and doodling in it. Here are three small drawings/sketches that I made when I was doing other things. I sketched the mountains with the giant, the fountain, and the goblin on the subway (although I colored some of it in at my desk afterwards). The picture of lower Manhattan comes from the picture window on the 9th floor of the Brooklyn courthouse from my day of jury duty (don’t worry I wasn’t skiving from my civic duty–but there was a lot of downtime). I sketched the donut baby while I was talking to a friend about stickers and Philistines (Biblical and otherwise) so it may have been influenced by that peculiar conversation.
Sketch of Lower Manhattan from Courthouse (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
Kindly let me know what you think! I’m afraid have been running around trying to figure out my new job, so please forgive me for my tardy responses to comments during the past week. I love comments & I promise I will answer everybody. Just give me a moment to figure out how everything works!
Strange Priests with Donut (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
It’s Friday night right before Pride weekend—just after a landmark Supreme Court ruling making equal marriage rights into national law throughout the United States. I just realized I am painting a rainbow mantis shrimp (as a part of one of my weird paintings). Tomorrow I am going to a children’s birthday party to paint faces. It occurs to me that maybe I should write about rainbows—the quintessential manifestation of color, joie de vivre, and liberation (political, sexual, spiritual, and otherwise).
Landscape with Rainbow (Joseph Anton Koch, 1824, oil on canvas)
Of course rainbows are really a meteorological/optic phenomenon which can be seen whenever there are water drops suspended in the atmosphere with sunlight shining through (from behind the observer) at a particular angle. The light is refracted into a prismatic range of visible wavelengths. This rote description however does scarce justice to the great beauty of the effect which has a transcendent glowing loveliness.
Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow
Thanks to this otherworldly beauty, the rainbow has many mythological associations in different pantheons: divine messengers use it as a bridge in Greek and Norse mythology, while the rainbow serpent rides it throughout the multiverse in aboriginal myth! In the Judeo-Christian Bible, the rainbow represents God’s covenant not to destroy all life ever again…by means of flood (a binding promise which always struck me as dangerously undermined by the appended clause). The leprechauns’ gold is hidden at the end of the rainbow—which is a place which can never be reached since the colors are an effect of light and not a real object (which makes it a perfect hiding place for the fantasy gold of mythical beings).
US World War I Victory Medal
Rainbows have a long history as political symbols as well. The rainbow was the logo of the Cooperative movement during the German Peasant’s War of the 16th century (a profoundly unhappy social lesson which I will write about in detail as soon as I get some of that leprechaun gold). It has been used as a general symbol of peace after the World Wars (and even longer in Italy) and of racial cooperation in the sixties and, more especially, in post-Apartheid South Africa. Since the seventies, the rainbow has been the symbol of gay pride and the LGBT social movement—progressive trends which have made astounding transfigurative leaps within my own lifetime. The original pride flag was designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978 for the first Pride parade (which took place of June 25th of that year).
The original 8-color Pride Flag
Baker’s original eight stripe LGBT rainbow has been gradually pared down to six colors by marketers in their obsessive bid to make things more simple and iconic (a broader sales philosophy which seems to me to strip the beauty and meaning from many aspects of the world). Hopefully the rainbow—symbolic or real–won’t be further compromised by such dodgy principles! In the meantime have a delightful midsummer weekend and celebrate. Here in New York, it is supposed to rain and be beautiful at the same time, so perhaps we will get a real rainbow to compare with all of the flags and ornaments.
Today’s Pride Flag
Gilbert’s potoroo (Potorous gilbertii)
Gilbert’s Potoroo (Potorous gilbertii) was a ratlike marsupial fungivore which lived in great numbers throughout south-west Australia—particularly around King George Sound. The animals were discovered to science by the great naturalist George Gilbert in 1840. Unfortunately the potoroo proved to be extremely vulnerable to introduced predators such as foxes and dingoes. After an exhaustive search in the 1970s failed to find any living specimens of the creature (which had not been seen in decades) the unlucky mammals were deemed extinct, and thus Gilbert’s potoroo vanished forever from the—[needle comes off of sad record]—wait! actually this strange rodent-like/kangaroo-like creature was rediscovered in 1994.
After nearly two decades during which time the potoroos were presumed dead, a small population was found living in a remote and inaccessible scrubland beside Two Peoples Bay in Western Australia. The area was proclaimed a nature preserve and humankind leapt into action to save the beleaguered potoroo.
Gilbert’s potoroo, Potorous gilbertii
Yet, it has not been easy to relaunch the peculiar animal. The creatures live on truffle-like fungi, which they dig up with their three toed paws (each digit has a sharpened digging claw). The male potoroos are susceptible to balanoposthitis, a bacterial disease which disfigures the genitals with inflammation and leaves the creatures unable to reproduce. Also the animals seem to be extremely sensitive to cryptococcosis, a dangerous fungal disease which can lead to coughing and respiratory failure.
Fortunately, patient zookeepers, rangers, and volunteers have been working to help Gilbert’s potoroo overcome these alarming hurdles. The world population now numbers nearly 70—but the peculiar marsupial digger remains one of the planet’s most endangered mammals.
Joos Van Cleve was active in Antwerp from 1511 to 1540. His winsome figures have a delicacy and elegance which is somewhat in contrast to the earthier figures of Flemish painting. He was also a pioneer in putting large decorative landscapes behind his figures (although, to my eyes his landscapes are much inferior to landscapes by the greatest artists of the previous generation—like Bosch and Patinir). In a way Van Cleve’s great innovation was combining the elegance and color of French art, the ecumenical breadth of Flemish painting, and the verisimilitude of Italian painting. This magnificent picture of the Virgin and Child with Angels rewards close scrutiny. You should blow up the image (for this is a huge file) and enjoy the appealing little details such as the deer woven into the rug, the tart summer cherries which a footman is offering to Mary, and the same footman’s studded jerkin!
Of course Van Cleve was not the peerless master that some of his more well-known contemporaries were and he sometimes overreached. Looking at the less-than-perfect curly-haired angel in the acid-color jerkin gives me hope for my own career as a painter (whereas sometimes the works of Raphael and Perugino leave me in despair about ever picking up a brush).
Conservationists and biologists often have a hard time explaining their concepts and concerns to politicians and business leaders: our leaders are frequently motivated by political and economic calculations which seem pretty far removed from the living world. One of the ideas which environmentalists have invented in order to rectify this communications problem is “ecosystem services” the concept that there is a real and calculable use value of living organisms and systems. A famous example right now is bees—which pollinate crops and thus provide immediate tangible value to fruit and vegetable farmers. There are all sorts of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and other crops which would not grow without bees. Some other current examples are wetlands—which filter water and provide a sort of storm safety zone around coasts—or fisheries which provided delicious fish. By putting a pricetag on ecosystems and endangered animals, scientists hope to emphasize to leaders how important conservation is.
Eco what? Yeah, that’s great now run along.
Unfortunately this methodology is prone to all sorts of problems, as was demonstrated by a bee study for Nature Communications which was conducted by a team lead by David Kleijn. The survey set about assessing to what extent economically useful crops are pollinated by wild bees. The authors thus hoped to appraise the ultimate value of the native bees. You can look at the actual paper and draw your own conclusions about their assumptions and methods, but the team concluded that wild bees are immensely valuable—with a worth of about $3,251.00 per hectare of agricultural land.
Thanks, bees!
The team however went further and broke down the economically valuable labor all of the different bees by species. This led them to conclude that only 2% of bee species were contributing in a meaningful way to crop pollination (and this hard-working 2% of wild bees are from species which are actually doing pretty well, and seem unlikely to go extinct). All of the remaining bees were deemed worthless shirkers of no economic use to humankind. The paper seemed to suggest that if they all go extinct it won’t take food off the table or money out of anyone’s pockets.
Hmm…
What? Are David Kleijn and his team dangerous hyper-rationalists who belong in an Ayn Rand book? Regular readers of this blog will already be wondering about these conclusions. Aren’t parasitoid wasps critical to protecting crops? What ecological niche do the allegedly valueless species take up? What happens if they die off and there are horrifying consequences which the ecologists, agricultural scientists, and theorists never anticipated? Indeed we have seem such things happen again and again—like Australia’s rabbits or these accursed crown-of-thorns starfish. Life is a web and when you start removing strands the entire edifice begins to flip around and malfunction in unexpected ways.
In fact I believe the paper might be designed to poke some critical holes in the irrational nature of purely economic cost/benefit calculations. The introductory paragraphs seem calculated to stir up the media into asking some important questions about this kind of thinking (and, of course, the paper is also designed to give a PR boost to David Kleijn and co.). However, the fact that the results may have been designed to stir up controversy does not make the fundamental questions less valid. The fundamental calculus behind ecosystem services as a policy tool is inadequate. But what else can we use in a world of ever-growing population and ever-diminishing resources?
Jaggy MacBee walks towards retirement
Today’s post comes from the thrilling (?) world of international football aka soccer [Ed. Are you sure this is right?] Although, to American eyes, soccer sometimes seems to lack critical elements of sport (excitement, skill, scoring, and so forth), it definitely has the most important thing: wacky mascots! In fact, soccer arguably has the wackiest mascots, as is very emphatically demonstrated by the new mascot of the Scottish football team Partick Thistle (er, that’s apparently the name of their soccer club, not the new spokesbeing). Apparently the old mascot, Jaggy MacBee, (pictured above) was not edgy enough for something as riot-inducing as Scottish football. Fortunately, the new mascot, pictured below in all of his (its?) stark raging horror is nothing but edges! Well, that isn’t entirely true, “Kingsley” the yellow thistle also has a mouth-breathing look of angry stupor and a unibrow to go with his (its?) sharpened head.
“Kingsley” the thistle mascot
The internet has been abuzz with sarcastic quips about the ambulatory thistle and with wistful nostalgia for the unemployed bee (as indeed was almost certainly the intent of some sinister group of marketers behind the entire switch). Even despite the transparently manipulative nature of the upgrade, there really is something poignant about the substitution. Bees are fading from our pesticide-heavy world (as we will discuss in a real post tomorrow) while irritating characters specifically and solely designed to create an angry emotional response are proliferating.
“Why won’t anyone sit with me?”
Also, Kingsley is not unfunny. He has his own particular Alfred Jarry flavor, as was the intent of the responsible artist David Shrigley, who designs deliberately crude cartoons to mock the shirking anomie of contemporary mass culture (at least that’s how I am going to interpret them). How would you design a thistle mascot? It is not necessarily an easy challenge, although I know my submission would have been more purple and baroque—like everything I make. Stay tuned for the further adventures of Kingsley and Jaggy MacBee. I get the sense we haven’t heard the last of these guys—if for no other reason than the obtrusive attention-seeking of their makers.
“Eh…what are you gonna do?”
Happy Summer Solstice*! Also happy Father’s Day to all of the dads out there! Ferrebeekeeper doesn’t usually publish on Sundays, but because it is a special day, here is a celebratory image of an ancient druid with a golden sickle and a megalith. This is a perfect image for the first day of summer, however it is somewhat more ambiguous as a father’s day image… Still, I feel that it has some paternal magic, and it is certainly better than neckties and golf-themed art. My own father would probably prefer an archer, but I got a bunch of cartoon spies and elfin cosplayers when I googled that…so the wise druid elder will have to do.
I am so excited for summer! Let’s make it a great one!
*Actual solstice may vary by hemisphere.
A New Species of Flapjack Octopus (photo by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute)
Happy news from the ocean depths: marine biologists have discovered an endearingly cute deep sea octopus in the cold deep ocean waters off the continental shelf of California. The newfound octopus is about the size of a fist and looks a lot like the ghosts from Pac-man. The creatures’ default color seems to be a rich orange-pink. It has big soulful black eyes and little fins atop its head which look like cartoon cat ears.
Stephanie Bush, an octopus scientist (!!!) from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has spent nearly a year studying the new octopus which she classifies as belonging to the “flapjack” octopuses (a family of animals which sound like they merit additional attention from Ferrebeekeeper). The genus of the octopus is thus pre-established as “Opisthoteuthis” but she is toying with “adorabilis” as a species name (which sounds like a wise choice in the internet era).
So far very little is known about these cute mollusks which live in coastal Pacific waters at depths between 200 and 600 meters. Every one of the dozen specimens thus far found has been female. According to Bush, “They spend most of their time on the bottom, sitting on the sediment, but they need to move around to find food, [&] mates.” I am curious what the male octopuses are like. I presume they are pink and adorable as well, but sexual dimorphism is not unknown among cephalopods. Also, how widespread are these animals? Do they live beyond the California coast?
We need to know so much more. Dr. Bush needs to get back to work, and we are definitely going to need more pictures!
Liberty Enlightens the World (Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, dedicated 1886, copper and steel)
As everyone knows, the Statue of Liberty (which is actually properly titled “Liberty Enlightening the World”) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture which stands in the harbor of my beloved home city, New York, New York. This is the 130th anniversary of the statue arriving in New York from France. The 93 meter tall statue was a lavish gift from the French people, who obviously know how to give astonishing amazing beautiful presents! I won’t get into the elaborate political, engineering, and fundraising history behind the statue’s conception, fabrication, and construction: suffice to say, it has a very complicated story (as one would expect in a monumental joint artistic venture between two of Earth’s greatest nations).
I will note that the statue has greatly overshadowed its creator, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi—which seems inconceivable today when most art is an afterthought to the virulent self-aggrandizement of art world personalities. If something similar were attempted now we would probably end up with a 90 meter tall statue of Jeff Koons…or of some part of his anatomy (though I shudder to write that down, lest I give him any ideas).
A Statue by Bartholdi of Bartholdi with the Bartholdi statue that made him famous (OK, maybe he did have SOME self reflective self-promotional flair)
Bartholdi was an Alsatian and a freemason. He studied architecture and then served in the disastrous Franco-Prussian War (a conflict when the excesses of the Second Empire came back to haunt France—and a war which provided dark foreshadowing for the great industrial wars of the twentieth century). Bartholdi conceived of the statue as a tribute to democracy and freedom just after the American Civil War—when France was under the dictatorial regime of Napoleon III. Because of the authoritarianism and inequality of the time, the idea was shelved until after the Prussians drove this second Napoleon into exile and ushered in the third republic.
Although before Lady Liberty he designed a colossal statue for the entrance to the Suez Canal…
The Statue of Liberty is so universally iconic that it is hard to look at as a work of art—which is a shame because it is very lovely. The fluid Roman robes belie the practical architecture beneath. Atop the statue is a glowing crown of radiant beams—the neoclassical symbol for divinity. The enigmatic face is simultaneously stern and compassionate (though it is said that Bartholdi based it on his mother which might explain these juxtaposed emotions—and the very human tenderness with which the artist wrought the giant metal face).
It is frustratingly difficult to find pictures of other Bartholdi sculptures. I see here that he created a work titled “Genius in the Grasp of Misery” which sounds incredibly relevant and germane as I scrabble piteously for rent, but sadly I can’t find any photos of it. He designed a fountain “The Little Vintner of Colmar” which features a handsome youth drinking a never-ending stream of wine. The statue is as delightful as its description and was a gift from the city of Colmar to the city of Princeton New Jersey…What was going on in the nineteenth century that cities were all giving art to each other? It seems like an amazing trend which has passed.
The Little Vintner of Colmar (Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, 1869, bronze)
Speaking of which, it occurs to me, that I have never thanked the French people for their far-sighted generosity. Allow me to do so now! Everyone here loves the statue and we deeply love our beautiful exasperating intelligent friends across the Atlantic (even if it sometimes seems like we are at odds). Vive la France et merci pour le cadeau magnifique!
A quarter scale model of the Statue of Liber…Liberty Enlightens the World in Paris France–it’s even on a miniature island.
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