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I was recently back at the family farm (which is in the Ohio Valley). Since I almost never go there in late autumn it gave me a precious opportunity to see some of my favorite trees wearing their brilliant fall raiment. Unfortunately I am no photographer–and I never found the time to paint a watercolor painting of autumn’s beauty–however I wanted to share the two most magnificent trees.
Here is the bald cypress which we planted to emulate grandpa’s bald cypress in Weston (which was apparently chopped down the moment he left his house). This tree is a young bald cypress, and it would still be in middle school if it was a human (which fortunately it is not, since it would be a dull child standing beside a goose pond all day), however it is already beginning to develop the knobby swamp knees and flying buttresses characteristic of the great cathedral cypresses of the southern swamp. It is maybe 6 meters (20 feet tall) and it is growing fast. I wish I could have captured the beauty of its warm orange fronds, because in the setting sun they glowed like it was a little ember from the November sun. I wish I could explain to you how winsome the tree is. There is something about all of the Cupressaceae which makes one want to hug them like a robe wearing lunatic from Northern California.
The second tree was my parents’ first choice of trees to plant and it is beginning to reach stunning maturity. It is a pecan tree and it is starting to produce nuts. You can’t see how large it is, but it probably about 13 or 14 meters (45 plus feet) and it is also growing fast. Sadly I could not capture its size with pictures (I need a giraffe or a basketball player to go stand beside it), but when you are near it, you now get a feeling of awe–in addition to whatever appreciation you have for its graceful lines and lovely proportions. There are larger trees back in the forest, but they are forest oaks, walnuts, and hickory which grow tall and straight and do not spread like the glorious pecan. Pecan trees are capable of growing to 40 meters (130 feet) in height with a spread of 22 meters (75 feet) so we will keep hoping that none of the freakish storms which have been growing in number and strength bedevil either of these beloved trees before they reach that kind of height. I wish you could actually see these trees–they are so beautiful!
It is almost October and the last flowers of the season are blooming in my garden. I blogged earlier about my roommate’s pale beige morning glories. Here are some picture of my morning glories, which I planted in the back yard. Look at the beautiful combination of purple and white! It really is like a “Carnival of Venice” (which was the name on the package) insomuch as a tiny circular tropical flower can resemble a wintertime holiday in an Italian city state. The second variety of morning glories which I planted climbed so high up a tree that they have almost vanished from sight, but you can still see how they got their name “Scarlett O’Hara” (hint: not just from toying with the hearts of various successful merchants and landowners).
We have had an awful lot of politics around here this autumn. How about today we just concentrate solely on autumn? As I often mention, there is a Kwanzan cherry tree in my back yard in Brooklyn. It is a beautiful tree (although neither my photographs, artworks, nor my essays have ever fully captured its ineffable loveliness).
The cherry tree is most famous for how it looks in spring, when it resembles a radiant pink cloud descended from paradise, yet it is always gorgeous–even in winter when its bare limbs look like Chinese seal calligraphy. Indeed in autumn it glows a brilliant bright yellow which is nearly as lovely as the soft pink of spring.
Alas, as always, my photos do the tree a terrible injustice (also, hopefully you are not put off by the ornamental bacteriophages which I hung up back in summer to contextualize our current plight). I wish you could see it in the real world. Looking at its graceful, winsome branches has kept me sane during this long sojourn in the city (I don’t think I have left since the beginning of last December!) and I wish I could share the beauty with you. After all, as pretty as the tree is in its golden autumn finery, this yellow cloak is soon to fall and the cherry tree will be bare through the gloom, mist, darkness, and chill of winter. How are we ever going to make it back back to the blossoms this pestilent year?
Wildlife Quilt (Patricia Ferrebee, 2019), mixed cotton textiles
By accident, this week ended up being parti-color snake week. I am very much ok with this outcome–especially since the brilliant reptiles brighten up a dull and depressing part of the year while at the same time they are still safely in brumation and we don’t have to worry about accidentally stepping on them (at least here in Brooklyn). Anyway, to wrap up the week, I thought I would show you this exceedingly lovely quilt which my mother made for me. It is a wildlife quilt which features penguins, lions, bears, prairie dogs, orangutans, ostriches, llamas, and so many snakes. The creatures are pieced together out of little carefully cut pieces of cloth which are lovingly embroidered onto the larger quilt.
Alas, my photography skills are indifferent and I cannot show you the gorgeous glistening colors of the quilt. Because my parents have a quilt/knitting store (which you should visit if you are in Parkersburg, West Virginia), mom has a huge variety of magnificent new cotton print fabrics. I like the way all of the animals came out, but I am especially fond of the snakes which truly capture the brilliantly colored scales.
Something that always strikes me at the zoo is how a brightly colored snake (which is a shape humans instinctively recognize and react to!) lying on a bed of completely differently colored twigs and leaves is difficult to see. This quilt conveys something of that real-world effect (although my photographs do not capture the subtle scintillating colors of the fabrics and thus do not fully duplicate the verisimilitude).
It is lovely to lie on this quilt and read. It is like being on the veld or in the northwoods…yet without harsh temperature extremes or biting insects (or, you know, lions).
Mom’s quilts become more beguiling by the year (I will have to show you some of her nighttime garden quilts someday), but this animal quilt is a particular winner because it has animals! I think we can all agree that, one way or another, animals are pretty much the best aspect of life (even if not everyone is quite as fond of snakes and fish as I am). Look at the decorative stitching on that little snake in the early autumn forest!
These amazing quilted reptiles (including this purse lizard from an earlier post) are a reminder that imagination, artistry, and craft can endow our lives with some of the beauty and meaning of the natural world if we work at it. This is an important theme, which we need to return to, because it seems like the way we live and work in the industrialized automated world is not working as well for everyone as philosophers, economists, and social theorists of the late twentieth century envisioned. The beauty of the snakes are also a reminder that I need to collaborate with my mother to make another animal quilt at some point–perhaps the Australian outback or the deep sea!
Thanks again mom, for this magical blanket (which is as warm and functional as it is lovely). Right now though I had better go throw a lesser blanket over it. There are some real (domestic) animals clambering up onto my wild animal quilt and although I love them with all of my heart but I don’t trust them for a moment with my cherished quilt.
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It has been a while since I posted any of my flounder drawings on this blog, but don’t worry, ever since my art show back in August I have been working as harder than ever at drawing and sculpting allegorical flatfish. Indeed, I am working on a new show with some spectacular projects…but more about that later. For right now here are two small fish drawings. The first, above, is titled “Haywain Flatfish” and is meant to evoke the splendor of harvest season. A bewhiskered yokel carries off a sack of millet as the pumpkins ripen in the golden fields. An industrious beaver has been similarly productive and sits beaming beside his perfectly constructed dam. Although the scene conveys bucolic tranquility, the hollow black eyes of the fulsome flounder (and the circling vulture) speak of the coming austerity and darkness of winter.
This second image “AlienHeartSole” shows a flounder/sole with what looks like a big-hearted alien tentacle monster flying upon it in a personalized saucer. Although the alien seems benign, the imbecilic sphinx with a javelin, the bomb, and the tattered angel throwing a dart all suggest that this is an amoral and perplexing galaxy. Only the laid-back rooster offers a modicum of sanguine confidence…and it is unclear whether the gormless bird understands what is going on. If you enjoy these little tragi-comic images, you should follow me on Instagram (where Ferrebeekeeper goes by the sobriquet “GreatFlounder”). There you will find a great trove of colorful and enigmatic flatfish art. As part of the project which I mentioned above, I am trying to bring my various digital /web content into a more tightly networked gestalt, so I would be super appreciative for any Instagram follows!
My garden this year was not necessarily the magical success which I had hoped for it to be…but that’s ok, I can just write about someone else’s garden. My go-to garden for this kind of lazy blogging is Longwood Garden, a magical gilded age paradise in Chester County Pennsylvania which was the summer seat of the DuPont family.
Autumn is not the traditional apex of the gardening season, however Longwood Garden is such a stupendous garden that its planners can insouciantly eschew such conventional thinking. Every season is the apex of the gardening season there…up to and including winter (which is no petty feat in our temperate clime). To celebrate late autumn, Longwood created a Chrysanthemum festival with thousands of chrysanthemums agonizingly shaped into geometric forms by otherworldly patience (and by weird sadistic potting contraptions).
The effect is stupendous—it’s like what would happen if the world were invaded and colonized by beautiful alien flowers with a disturbing penchant for symmetry (although I guess that sort of did happen at the end of the Cretaceous). I hope someday I manage to actually get to Longwood to see the Chrysanthemum Festival in person. These pictures never do justice to the ineffable power of their pleasure gardens. The show runs until November the 19th so maybe my East Coast readers want to visit too.
I’m sorry. November is flying by on russet wings and still I have posted no photos of autumn color! i meant to write about beautiful autumn foliage, but, with one thing or another, I never managed to get out of New York. So…the only thing to do was to head out to my garden in Brooklyn and take some leaf pictures at home.
Autumn gardens have their own chaotic beauty of fallen leaves, brown spots, and jagged red vines. Plus it has been warm this year so there are still plenty of flowers.
However the queen of the garden, as always, is the ornamental Kwanzan cherry tree, which is nearly as beautiful covered in glowing yellow leaves as it is in summer wearing bright grass green…or even in spring when it is a lambent pink cloud. I love that tree!
A persimmon is a berry which grows on a persimmon tree, a group of species within the larger group Diospyros. The Diospyros trees are part of the majestic ebony family, and indeed persimmon trees are likewise noted for their hard, dense, elegant wood. The Diospyros are widespread trees, and native species of persimmon can be found in East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, the Philippines, and North America.
Persimmon berries (or fruit, as people call them) are an excellent source of dietary fiber, manganese, and beta-carotene (which people are always banging on about, but which I think is overrated). They do not otherwise contain significant nutrients…except perhaps sugars (once they have been sufficiently ripened or bletted). Unripe persimmons are astringent and somewhat indigestible. Indeed, green persimmons are noted for sometimes causing bezoars in humans who eat lots of green persimmons–the unripened flesh polymerizes into a woody ball which traps other food materials. These horrifying lumps can necessitate surgery (although apparently coca-cola dissolves them).
Persimmon trees are rugged and grow fast. Not only do their blossoms emerge after their leaves, which protects the buds from frost, they can also survive in polluted or unfavorable situations. My grandfather had a garden and a fruit orchard next to the Chesapeake Bay. The East Coast is slowly (or maybe not-so-slowly) receding into the ocean and the persimmons lived shockingly close to the saltwater until Hurricane Fran knocked them down in 1996. Throwing a football around while running across the slippery rotting fruit is my foremost persimmon memories, although I have also drunk the Korean spicy punch called sujeonggwa (and I found it delightful). Maybe I should try making a persimmon pie!
Additionally there is a beautiful autumnal orange color named after persimmon. It is a mid-tone orange with hints of red, almost the same hue as senior republicans, but slightly darker with woody brown notes. I like to write about seasonally appropriate colors, and I can hardly think of a hue more suited to early November (unless it is some sort of russet or woodland gray).
I’m off traveling until Monday, but here is a flounder image to tide you over until then (and to celebrate the first day of autumn). It has a certain September winsomeness, especially in New York (where this is the social season when all of the millionaires come back from their summer estates). Also there is an own, a tunnel and a big full barrell of some enigmatic but delightful product. Cheers!
New York City from Bus Window (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
This weekend I took a trip up to Kingston, an old colonial town up the Hudson River. I was visiting to see a friend’s art gallery, One Mile Gallery, (which you should check out when you are in the region–but more on that in later posts). I took the bus a hundred miles up the river and jumped out, prepared to walk through a few blocks of quaint historical district–but the actual walk was more like a five mile hike through fields and ravines, past old stockades and cement factories (and strip malls). Additionally I unknowingly visited on the day when the townsfolk reenacted the 1777 burning of their town by King George’s redcoats! The whole trip had a very spooky autumn feel and I highly recommend Kingston (although if you visit you should maybe plan better than me and not run through the forests at night as the first snows arrive).
Hudson Valley from Bus Window (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
Anyway here are four drawings I made on the trip. The first two were on the busride on the way up. There is New York City seen rising like a twisted lovely dream above the marshes and suburbs of New Jersey. Next we see the bucolic Hudson landscape blurring from the bus window.
Kingston (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil on paper)
This is a drawing of the historic cemetery at Kingston. I took certain liberties since I was rushing through and I drew in the details on the bus. The green statue guy is George Clinton, the fourth Vice-President of the United States. Finally on the bus ride home, I became enthralled by the same picturesque Hudson Valley clouds that have beguiled so many artists over the years. Hopefully you enjoyed the sketches from my little autumn mini-trip. I’ll get back to real posts tomorrow and we’ll start leading up to next week’s Halloween themed week of horror and dread!
Hudson Valley Sky in Autumn (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
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