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Welcome back! uh…to me, I guess, since you have been here all along, reading Dan Claymore’s posts. Speaking of which, a big thank you to Dan for looking after the old blogstead while I was home enjoying the gorgeous waning days of summer. We’ll keep our eyes out for his novels as soon as they hit the shelf (and I’m going to look more attentively at the tops of my sandwiches to see if there is parsley there). He’s right: terriers and working dogs are super awesome (although so are all of the hunting dogs…and the hounds…and most of the frou frou dogs too: in fact, pretty much all dogs are awesome, full stop).
It is good and necessary to get away, and as soon as I unpack, I will share some of the lovely and interesting things I found during my trip, but first, I realized I have been remiss in a more fundamental matter. I built a website for my artwork, but I never shared the link with anyone! So, without further ado, here is the link to my online gallery of artwork.
If you have a moment to kindly look the site over I would appreciate it enormously (and if you would perhaps leave me some thoughts about how things could be better, I would appreciate that even more). I work really hard on my artworks, but I try not to make them obsessively autobiographical. We have had a LOT of autobiographical art lately and it seems like maybe we could refocus a bit on the worldwide ecological crisis, or perhaps on some overlooked non-human characters who would enjoy our attention too. However the art world has sort of a set template (which is known to work), which frames the artist front and center instead of the artwork. My work instead focuses on a tragic all-knowing fish who reappears in endless protean guises. This flatfish represents ecology (specifically the complex and sometimes rapacious relationship of organisms to one another) and human history’s role in larger ecological cycles. It is unclear if people will be able to transfer the strong feelings they have for Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, or Cindy Sherman to a strange benthic fish.
If this strikes you as contrived, or if flatfish are not to your taste, there are other works from earlier creative periods, and there is even a little biographical section (although the best artists I know are mostly introverts/workaholics who spend the bulk of their time furiously drawing or painting). Anyway check it out and see what you think! I am happy to be back and I have some amazing things to talk about. Thanks again to Dan, and above all, thank you for reading and for you kind attention and your wonderful comments!
It has been a while since we had a post celebrating all things Gothic. Last week’s post about the Yellow Emperor has reminded me of the unsettling relationship which we all have with mirrors (which are so lifelife and yet so empty and which always feature our own aging countenances staring at us with mute appeal). I wondered if I could find some beautiful ornamental Gothic mirrors to put up in a little gallery. Boy howdy! There were a lot to chose from. Here is a little sampling:
Of course these mirrors have the beauty of Gothic style, but they lack the disturbing simulacra of life which real mirrors furnish. You will have to imagine your own face in them. Or you could head over to your nearest foreboding manor to see if you can find one of these beauties underneath a big gray dusty sheet. Or I guess you just buy them: they are mostly for sale on the internet, which is maybe the most disturbing thing of all….
It’s the day before the deadline for filing taxes here in America—an ordeal which only grows more complicated (thanks, Intuit, for lobbying to keep the code as complex as possible). From sea to sea, Americans are staring in baffled confusion at heaps of forms and receipts and rules. Well, probably the organized ones are happily enjoying their calm evenings and successful lives, having filed months ago…but that certainly doesn’t include everyone! Anyway, in an ill-conceived effort to make this deadline more palatable, here are some pictures of adorable baby tapirs!
Tapirs are actually perissodactyls. Their closest relatives are the horses and rhinoceroses. Perissodactyls were once the dominant quadruped grazers of the grasslands and forests of the Miocene and the Oligocene, but in more recent geological periods the odd-toed ungulates have been fading away. We can still catch glimpses of these glory years with pictures of adorable tapirs though.
Ferrebeekeeper has mentioned tapirs before—in connection with the baku, a mysterious and compelling mythological creature said to feast on dreams. I promise to come back and talk about tapirs properly and at length—they are exceedingly interesting survivors or a great age, however today we are focused only on their adorable properties. Look at how cute these dappled babies are (the little tapirs lose their protective dots as they grow into adulthood). Good luck with your own red tapir, er, I mean red tape. We will return to regularly scheduled posts tomorrow…just as soon as I drop some documents in the virtual post-office box.
Colorful Garden Cookies!
Today (December 4th) is national cookie day! Cookies are tiny sweet cakes which are eaten as dessert or a general treat…or with tea if you are English or Irish. The English and Irish, coincidentally, know them as biscuits (although it is unclear if it is ‘National Biscuit Day” over there). To celebrate, I thought about making my favorite cookies (oatmeal? snickerdoodles? chocolate crinkles?), but it is late in the day and anyway, at the end, I would just have tons of hot delicious cookies distracting me from flounder art. Plus, due to the sad limitations of the internet I cannot share baked goods with you—even though I like my readers and would love to bake a treat for you. So instead I have decided to celebrate cookie day by featuring pictures of cookies found (stolen?) from around the internet. I have a little gallery dedicated to several different Ferrebeekeeper topics.
Catfish Cookies!
Mollusc Cookies!
Serpent Cookies
Gothic Cookies!
Space Cookies
Crown Cookies: there were SO many of these. Why do people love kings and queens and princesses so much?
Mammal Cookies (barely) from Nanny’s Sugar Cookies LLC
Underworld Goddess Cookies
Turkey Cookies
Nightmarish Mascot Cookies
One of the delightful/disturbing things about this exercise is seeing how talented and creative everyone is. Look at the beauty of these cookies! Based on the esoteric subject matter (and the places I found the images) most of these are hand crafted, yet they look finer and more original than anything from a baker’s window. It is great to know how gifted everyone is too, but it is sad on several levels. If we can bring the earnestness, attention to detail, raw creativity, and hard work people put into baked goods into politics, we could get out of the political decline and societal stagnation we are in. Um, we are going to have to actually do that.
Barf
But we can worry about that later in the week (when I will shake off my torpor and write a meaningful essay on our political deadlock (and our moral problems in general). In the meantime, enjoy the cookies! After seeing what people have done with this medium I am thinking about making some cutters of my own so I can bring up my own cookie game. Also I still have that big project I am working on! I can’t wait to show you what it is in the New Year!
Oracular Chinese cookies
Thanks so much for your patience while I was working on my art show last week! My first New York solo show was a rousing success (even if it only lasted for a single night). Numerous friends, patrons,and even some strangers showed up to check out the 100 flounder pictures in their fancy Manhattan setting. The fish market was a success as well: far fewer flatfish are back on my walls (and if you reserved a flounder, I am holding it safe in a special secure undisclosed location so it stays fresh until you pick it up). Special thanks to all attendees and well-wishers! I only wish I had had more time to talk about art and the affairs of the world with each of you. Additionally, I really appreciate the emotional support from my readers who couldn’t make it to the Lower East Side. Particular thanks are due to my long-time supporters, Neomys Sapiens, Calender Girl, and above all Mom, who always gets pride of place in any thank you speech! Indeed, thanks to both of my parents for their inxhaustible patience and fortitude. Thanks too to Catinca Tabacaru Gallery for providing a space to grow and experiment (I promised not to use their branding on any promotional materials, but they really helped me out, and their lovely gallery deserves a visit next time you are in the City). My amazing new roommate Stephen Clarke provided this opportunity and did an astonishing job hanging 100 pictures so they look beautiful in a couple of short hours.
Now I have to figure out how and where to throw the next show. Keep your eyes peeled for art galleries that seem to have a penchant for surrealism, historical tableau, themes of ecology and symbiosis, or fish in general. Here are some images of the show to tide us over till the next time.
Speaking of moving forwards, I also drew a quick sketch of the solar eclipse as visible from the East River promenade at lunch hour. I didn’t have solar eclipse glasses and didn’t want to stare at the sun too much (also I had to get back to the office), but I think this quick sketch of the partial eclipse is mostly accurate. Hopefully I will have another art show before there is another solar eclipse! I hope to see you at the next shindig, and thanks again!
OK, some days, after a long day at work, I am a bit uninspired, but you know who never runs out of endless inventiveness? Nature! So today, as a run up for next week’s Halloween week of creepy art, here is a gallery of natural expressionism—nudibranch mollusks—some of the most vibrant and exquisitely colored animals in all of the world (you can look at an earlier Ferrebeekeeper gallery of nudibranchs here).
Now poisonous strange sea slugs are pretty creepy and seasonally appropriate, but to keep this filler post truly Halloween appropriate I have selected all orange, and black, or orange & black slugs (with maybe a fab or purple and white and green here and there). Behold the glory:
Aren’t they beautiful! Sometimes I wish I was a toxic gastropod that looked like Liberace and lived in a tropical sea…but alas, like so many of nature’s greatest works, they are vanishing as the oceans change.
I was going to show you the new blossom monsters I made to celebrate the annual blooming of the cherry tree in my back garden in Brooklyn, however, when I looked at the date on the calendar, I realized that today (April 25th) is World Penguin Day! Considering the threats faced by our black and white friends down under, I am going to keep the monsters in the hopper for tomorrow and dedicate today’s post to penguins.
The Mascot for the Lincoln Children’s Zoo
Rookie from “Club Penguin”
Anonymous “Off-the-rack” Mascot from China
by BiorgnSea9. Designed and Created by Jemm3 of Deviant Art
Theta Phi Alpha’s Penguin
The Pittsburgh Penguins Mascot
Now I could write about actual penguins (for their lives are intense and interesting) or I could write about literary penguins, or about penguins in zoos. Yet, it seems to me that some of the most instantly recognizable penguins are mascots and corporate logos. I don’t need to write a natural history treatise on penguins or call your attention to Anatole France in order to make you love penguins. If you are a good-hearted person, you already love them (if you are a hard-hearted monster who hates our flightless friends, what are you doing here? You need to stop reading and reexamine your life from bottom to top).
Badtz-Maru
Tuxedo Sam
So here is a gallery of penguin logos and mascots for you to enjoy.Linux and Penguin Books are among the more noble corporate entities out there, but there all sorts of other mascot penguins of all sorts.
I have hundreds of penguin classic books! I love this logo! But what about the classic cover design?
There are more penguin mascots than you could ever imagine. I have spared you from the thousands upon thousands of designs, costumes, and logos I have found and just put up a few of the highlights. One thing the World Penguin Day mascot hunt has taught me is that people like penguins more than we even know. We need to work harder to protect our elegant little feathered friends. If they start going to be extinct we are going to be shockingly sad.
DeBrazza’s monkey (Cercopithecus neglectus) Photo by In Cherl Kim
So far, Primate Week has been a huge success! The Year of the Fire Monkey has featured the loudest land animal, the immortal magician monkey god, and the disconcerting calculus of Dunbar’s number. There is still another topic which I wanted to address—an important primate post which I have planned to write for a long time–but it is almost midnight on Friday night, so I am going to bunt with a quick gallery post about color. Last week I wrote a piece about humankind’s love for the color red. I blithely assured everyone that primates are the most colorful mammals…however I didn’t back that up with any images.
Northern owl monkey (Aotus trivirgatus) photo by Mogens Trolle
Therefore, here are some beautifully colorful primates. I am only listing the species and the source (where available) so that you can revel in the beautiful color of these monkeys. If you want to learn what these colors betoken and how each species evolved such lovely patterns, you will have to look elsewhere. I have done my best to label each picture, but the WordPress function which allows a a blog’s creator to label images has been broken a long time (at least for the template I use). If you have any questions, just ask in the comments!
The mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx)
The Golden Langur (Trachypithecus geei)
The golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana)
Emperor Tamarin (Saguinus imperator)
Bald-headed uakari (Cacajao calvus) photo by Luis Louro
Zanzibar Red Colobus monkey (Procolobus kirkii) Olivier Lejade
Golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia)
Red-shanked douc (Pygathrix nemaeus)
It is a pretty intense rainbow! Look at how expressive their faces are. It is possible to read the personality of each monkey. Some of them remind of acquaintances from secondary school or world leaders, but of course we humans are not quite so colorful. Still we can pull off a mean combination of orange pink and brown in our own right. We also change colors somewhat when we are aroused, angry, or afraid! Colorful mammals indeed!
Human (Homo Sapiens) photo by Luis Aragon
Back in the day, my grandparents had a big drawer filled with skeleton keys that didn’t really seem to go to anything. It was deeply evocative yet ultimately frustrating—like a shelf full of novels in an unknown language or a secret passage in the back of a painting. Today’s post is like that as well. Here are beautiful keys to unknown locks. Larger context is missing.
This post is almost like a Flickr gallery. And yet the keys are very beautiful. Plus it has been forever since we featured a Gothic post (and I like to have a few Gothic posts during the holidays when night is ascendant). Ferrebeekeeper might be running out of Gothic posts. Maybe we have mined that seam dry or do any of you have any ideas? Is there another locked door somewhere that this key goes to?
To celebrate Halloween this week Ferrebeekeeper is exploring dreams and nightmares! Yesterday we introduced the Baku, a dream-eating, long-snouted spirit-beast from East Asia. Today we travel directly to the real of dreams and nightmares itself! Well sort of….Since I am unable to get inside the head of dreamers other than myself (at least with today’s technology) this means going to an almost equally scary place…the bedroom!
I wanted to combine the place where dreams happen with gothic decorative art (a particularly fitting style for Halloween). I therefore asked myself whether anyone had crafted overly-elaborate gothic beds. A quick Google Image search revealed the answer to be “Oh my goodness!” Apparently the world’s bedwrights have been hard at work creating an insane array of magnificent and horrifying beds to cradle the reposing bodies of well-heeled dreamers.
“Oh my…”
Here is a gallery filled with crazy and extravagant gothic beds (a fitting companion to past galleries of gothic clocks, lamps, gates, and houses). Behold the magnificent dark canopies, strange gargoyles, and haunting grotesques…along with every sort of flange, post, tower, buttress, arch, and bracket that imagination can conceive.
It’s difficult to believe that people sleep in such dark slendor…anyway, hopefully this range of bedframes will inspire your Halloween dreams (assuming that the baku does not get them first). Sleep well!
ferrebeekeeper 