Four Sketches from my Trip HomeWayne Ferrebee

Soybean Field (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)

I’m sorry I didn’t write a post last Thursday or Friday: I was away from Brooklyn on a whirlwind family trip to see the farmstead and visit my parents and grandparents.  Now I love Brooklyn with all of my heart, but it was a great relief to be away from it for a little while.  It was lovely to feed the thousand gentle farm creatures, to assess the growth of the plums, apples & nut trees in the orchard, and to walk back through the soybean fields into the true forest.

Parkersburg (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)

Unfortunately there wasn’t much in the way of writing time (and there isn’t much internet access in West Virginia and southeastern Ohio anyway).  However I have a few little drawings which I doodled while I was home.  My favorite is at the top of the page—it is a view of the soybean fields as the viewer emerges from the forest and is struck by the dazzling deep green of the plants.  Soybeans are a critical crop in numerous ways, but I never really noticed them as a child–perhaps because I didn’t yet love edamame, or maybe because I hadn’t become used to living in a world of asphalt and bricks.  Anyway, I will write a post about soybeans, but I wanted to share a quick impression of their overwhelming glowing greenness.   The second picture is a drawing from the road of Parkersburg, West Virginia.  The town is actually both much prettier and much uglier than the sketch—there are numerous picturesque Romanesque and “Jacobethan” churches and buildings, but there also some truly dispiriting strip malls along the outskirts (which I represented with a Kia dealership).  Still the town has been improving incrementally for decades—perhaps thanks to my parents’ lovely yarn shop and quilting shop (which you should totally visit if you are ever in the Midwest/Appalachian region).

Paisley (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)

Speaking of quilting, I also drew a purely abstract picture of paisleys after I became fascinated by the printed patterns of the bolts of quilting cloth. Ever since the age of the Mughals, paisley has regularly come into fashion and then fallen out of it.  Yet the concept seems to be much more ancient than the Scottish textile makers of the early industrial revolution or the Mughals.  Paisley is another subject I need to blog about—because I think it is tremendously beautiful.

Goose Pond (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)

Finally there is a little drawing of the goose pond.  I sketched it quickly (and from a distance) just before we drove off to the airport, but you can still see a few little pilgrim geese swimming about on it.  My parents’ flock of these creatures has succeeded beyond all measure and now it is like their farm is infested with miniature dinosaurs.  Everywhere you look there are geese busily gnawing on grass, biting each other’s tails, or jumping sadly (with expectant open beaks) beneath tantalizing green apples.  I am sorry I didn’t do a sketch that really does justice to the lovable avine miscreants, however I am afraid that if I had stood among them long enough to draw them, they would have begun to nibble on me like a big ear of corn (which is their affectionate way of gently reminding visitors that geese get hungry for corn and lovely for attention).  Thanks for looking at my drawings—now that I am back from my trip and my mind is refreshed I will try to blog about some of these new subjects!