Cockerel Cycle

Cockerel Cycle and French Cruller (Wayne Ferrebee, 2014, oil on panel)

It’s National Doughnut Day!  To celebrate, here are two paintings from my Microcosmic Doughnut Series.  Topologists and astrophysicists posit that our universe has a toroid shape—so I have combined my disparate background in history, toymaking, natural history, and Flemish-style painting to craft doughnut-shaped microcosms. Within these intricate cosmological confections, people and animals from throughout time converge in a never-ending circle—in the manner of the water cycle, the Krebs diagram, or an ouroboros.  Thus the individual elements in these paintings not only have metaphorical significance, they are also part of a dynamic larger picture.  Each landscape of dynamically intertwined symbols represents the cycles within individual life, history, or biology.   Each little doughnut painting is its own self-contained world; yet, taken in aggregate, the individual stories of predators and prey, metabolism, historicism, world trade, or biorhythms of organisms signify even larger cycles of creation and destruction not readily discernible from the fixed perspective of an individual life.  For example, the one above is about a classical French bon-vivant…or maybe it is about frogs or about cocks or chicken eggs.  There is also a fertility aspect to it (not to mention a French cruller in the middle).

Furnacemandonut

Furnace Doughnut (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, oil on panel)

This second painting is less easily explained.  A variety of brightly colored synthetic organisms fly up out of a baker’s furnace.  Above the mysterious swarm, a humanoid figure in an asbestos suit and a blue-hot dragon spray fire on a salamander which basks in the radiant pure energy.  Blue-black gothic stoves dance around beneath the centerpiece of the composition: a glowing lava doughnut congealing out of the primal kitchen…or is it just a delicious glazed doughnut with chocolate icing and an orange squiggle?  The whole scene makes me hungry for cheap baked pastries…and for raw creation.  Now I’m off to paint some more.  Let me know what you think (and enjoy Doughnut Day with your loved ones).