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Happy Halloween! This year, I have been working on a new series of artworks centered on flatfish. I suppose flatfish have supplanted toruses as the primary focus of my art. People seem to like flounder better than donuts (the asymmetric fish have more personality…or at least they have faces), however the universe is not shaped like a flatfish (according to current models), so it raises the question of what the flounder means symbolically. Flatfish are regarded as a delicious prey animal by humans, however they are excellent predators in their own right: they are sort of the middle-class of the oceans. Like the middle class, the pleurectiformes are experts at blending in, and they change their color and pattern to match their circumstances. Today’s circumstances, however, are not merely muddy sand flats—the whole world is filled with wild eclectic ambiguity which is hard for anyone to follow (much less a bottom-dwelling fish). My full flounder series thus explore the larger human and natural ecosystems of the late Holocene and early Anthropocene world. Each one lives in a little predatory microcosm where it is hunting and hunted.
The bizarre asymmetry of the flatfish also appeals to me. Since my artwork seemingly concerns topology, this may be significant—although a classical knot theorist would blithely observe that a flatfish is homeomorphic with a torus (assuming one regards the digestive tract as a continuous tube). At any rate it is currently Halloween and the flounder need to blend in with the monsters, goblins, witches, and mummies of the scary season! I made three black and white pen and ink flounders to use as Halloween coloring pages. These are supposed to print out at 8.5 inches x 11 inches, but who knows how wordpress will format them for your device? Let me know if you want me to send you a JPEG.
The top flounder is a classical Halloween artwork of haunted houses bats, witches, pumpkins, and mummies. In the center, mortality and the devil grasp for the human soul. The mood of the second artwork is more elusive and elegiac: dark fungi grow upon the sole as an underling hauls a dead gladiator away in the depths. Serpent monsters fill up the sky and our lady of the flowers blesses a corpse. The final pen and ink drawing is unfinished (so you can add your own monster) but it centers around a haunted jack-in-the-box and a ruined windmill. A bog monster, scarecrow and lady ghost haunt the doomed landscape.
I also threw in three little colored Halloween flounder at the bottom–as a teaser for my Instagram page. You should check it out for your daily flounder (free of commentary and text, as is increasingly the way of our digital age). I hope you enjoy these colorful treats and have a wonderful holiday!
Nightjar (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
It is 11:00 PM on Friday night after a long week and I have no blog post written. You know what that means! It’s time to take out my little book and post some of the frivolous sketches which I do on the train or at lunch. Since it is October and we are approaching the scary Halloween feature week, I have been doing some creepy otherworldly little drawings. Above is a nighttime laboratory with two mad scientists hard at work doing some transgenic modifications to various organisms. Ethereal spirit people drift by outside beneath the cold stars and various beasts and plants inhabit the spaces of the Gothic room not taken up by weird lab apparati. The seated scientist bears a striking resemblance to a particular Abrahamic deity, but perhaps he is just playing god (not that there is anything wrong with that). Only when I was done with the picture did I realize that the second scientist bears a striking resemblance to Rick from Rick and Morty (do you watch The Adventures of Rick and Morty? You should!).
Little Glowing Man in Pod (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil and ink)
In the second drawing, a little glowing man in a hyperbaric pod lands on a strange world as a many limbed beast cavorts atop his craft. The fronds of the creature’s vegetative back are a refuge for tiny green elf-like beings. A pulpy red sphere with a green top in the foreground may be a tomato…or a larval version of the creature. There is really nothing more to say about this image.
Root Doodle (Wayne Ferrebee, ink and colored pencil)
I’m going to steer clear of April Fool’s hijinks because today marks Ferrebeekeeper’s one year anniversary! Happy anniversary to all readers! To celebrate, I am posting doodles which I drew during business meetings during the previous year. Hopefully their silly nature will satisfy your funnybone and provide an adequate anniversary celebration.
Doodle of Dynastic Egypt (Wayne Ferrebee, pen and colored pencil)
This one year anniversary also provides an excellent occasion for the announcement of exciting future plans and for some remarks concerning the overarching structure and themes of this blog. First, the announcement: I am going to launch my online gallery of my own artworks by the beginning of May. I always intended this blog as an interdisciplinary means to provide context and meaning to my visual art—and yet I have never even shown any of my paintings or drawings to you! For shame! So it’s time to grasp the chimera by the horns and post digital images of the finished paintings and drawings I currently have on hand. I hope to smoothly integrate the gallery of images with the daily blog: ideally the two will combine to form a powerful and unique synthesis. However, the project is liable to be chaotic–and so I apologize in advance for disruptions and confusion. On the plus side, I have been growing and improving as an artist so I am excited to share my works with you. As always I am eagerly looking forward to your remarks and comments. As proof of my earnestness I am publishing some scans of doodles I made during office meetings—but be assured these are only scribbles I made to pass the time. I don’t have digital images of my real work yet, but my real oeuvre is coming soon to this space.
Blue urban caprice (Wayne Ferrebee, Colored pencil and pen)
OK…onward to some remarks about this blog itself:
The categories I have chosen for Ferrebeekeeper are the symbols I cling to in my quest for meaning. I’m going to explain better how they relate to one another. In the era before computers, people writing research papers or other large nonfiction works would keep relevant facts on notecards indexed by subject. The daily posts which I put here are rather like such collected notecards. I truly hope that each one is intriguing in its own right and provides you a daily moment of wonder at the beauty and strangeness of Greek monsters or wombats or the planet Mercury. But the interdisciplinary subjects serve a larger purpose. There is a relationship between serpents, gothic art, and chthonic gods. There are commonalities underpinning the lives of mollusks, turkeys, catfish, and mammals as they compete for resources and strive to reproduce themselves. As I put up my art gallery I will try to explain why I post about crowns (the short answer is I think they are funny) and how these jeweled hats actually represent certain important aspects of history and politics. I will attempt to underline the relationships between these disparate subjects and explain how they provide meaningful frames of reference about the larger world.
Whimsical Doodle of City and Sweets (Wayne Ferrebee, pen and colored pencil)
I will leave you with the funniest of my doodles. It portrays a handsome young mollusk cyclops wondering through a world of possibilities and enticements. Things might not be perfect, but it still looks like he/she/it is having fun! I certainly am as I write this and I hope you are enjoying reading. Happy Bloggiversary and Happy April Fool’s Day! Here’s looking forward to another good year!
Casual sketch of a One-eyed Mollusk on Holiday (Wayne Ferrebee, pen and ink with crayon)
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