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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!
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.
October is Ferrebeekeeper’s big month! In year’s past we have featured special theme weeks on the undead, the flowers of the underworld, the children of echidna, and flaying. Don’t worry: there is plenty of macabre Halloween material coming up for spooky season this year. In the meantime, to tide you over, here is a winged serpent wearing a crown. Maybe it escaped from the serpent bearer!
Doodle (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015 colored pencil and ink)
I carry around a little Moleskine sketchbook and a tin of pencils and I doodle whimsical little scenes on the train and at lunch. Here are some scenes from the last fortnight!
Make the Moche of Life (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015 colored pencil and ink)
After writing my Halloween-time post about the Moche and their bat-theme pottery I was not done with their exhilarating & scary style. This is a cartoony-yet somehow intense and impressive picture of spirit beings from the long-lost world of the Moche, brought to life again after all of these years by the magic of art. The decapitator is there in the right. Various night creatures and spirit folk surround the great murderous sea god…his claws twitch open, hungry for necks to cut….
Toy Windmill Plan (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015 colored pencil and ink)
For Halloween I was Don Quixote. I carried a little model windmill around so I could say “Forsooth! I caught this baby monster!” I made the windmill myself out of detritus I found in the recycling pile—in the same style as my unpublished book of toy vehicles. This was the preliminary sketch for my toy windmill, but I colored it in and added little autumn figures around it.
Costume Party (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015 colored pencil and ink)
Speaking of Halloween, here are some revelers at a costume party I attended: it was a party for a theatre-troupe “One Year Lease” which puts on thought-provoking (or otherwise provocative) plays in Manhattan and Greece. The woman with the goat legs was dressed as some sort of androgynous Welsh nature spirit—she had one of the best outfits I have ever seen. The person dancing in the middle was supposed to be a time traveler from the future world of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” His suit lit up and made loud futuristic rock-and-roll noises.
In the Realm of the Mech Hippo (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015 colored pencil and ink)
Also with a fantastic bent, here is a drawing of a giant mechanized hippopotamus surrounded by fairy folk and oddballs. There is a bear with pantaloons, a composer, and two sentient hot-dogs (?). A willow tree buds in front of the dazzling sun. What does it all mean?
Traveler with Smart Phone (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015 colored pencil and ink)
Finally here is a woman with pink accessories riding the train. She was completely lost in her cell phone and never once looked up at the crazy spectacles in the train car. Fortunately I was there to sketch it all down in my little book.
A Flayed man holding his own skin (Gaspar Becerra, 1556, Etching)
It’s Halloween week already: the time when the spirit realm comes closest to the mortal world (well, according to ancient lore, anyway). This is always a “theme week”, which Ferrebeekeeper devotes to a single topic which is sinister, magical, disquieting, and macabre. In past year’s we have taken on dark subjects like the children of Echidna, the Flowers of the Underworld, the undead, and the realm of nightmares, but this year we are going back to the roots of civilization to examine an ancient horror. Sadly, this ghastly topic is not a dark myth or an accursed dream, but an all-too real invention of human savagery.
Flaying is a method of torture and execution, which was used in ancient times (and not-so-ancient times) to kill a person in the most terrible and painful way. Of course hunters and animal farmers are familiar with flaying as stripping the skin off of a dead animal so that the hide can be cured as a pelt or a leather, and so that the animal’s meat can then be butchered for consumption (although this is more commonly known as “skinning” in English). This is done with a knife or similar sharpened implement and farmers/hunters/chefs generally try to keep the hide as intact as possible. At some point in the depths of prehistory, some evil person first realized the same method could be used to cut the skin off of a living person. Skinning more than a portion of a person is fatal. Wikipedia blandly cites Ernst G. Jung, a famed dermatologist, writing: “Dermatologist Ernst G. Jung notes that the typical causes of death due to flaying are shock, critical loss of blood or other body fluids, hypothermia, or infections, and that the actual death is estimated to occur from a few hours up to a few days after the flaying.” How did Jung know that? We want to know and yet clearly we also do not want to know. I found a lot of arguments online about whether modern medicine could rescue a flayed person. I will summarize the upshot of lots of nightmarish dumbassery as “maybe… in perfect circumstances, but probably not.”
At this point, if you are like me you are probably saying “GLAAARGH! What the hell? Why would anybody ever do such a thing? And why write about it? Why should I even think about such monstrous savagery? I am going to go look at pictures of cute little songbirds.” That is a good point and those questions/sentiments are very pertinent, but you should not go to the cute animal site yet.
Here is a cute little bird to break the tension.
Flaying keeps cropping back up in human history, art, and myth. It reveals something about us in a dark tale which stretches across millennia. Mostly, of course, it reveals that we are very tragic and cruel animals, but that is a truth well worth remembering (assuming you can somehow not see it within the daily news). Flaying also reveals some of our stagecraft for manipulating and controlling each other–which I will get into tomorrow with the story of the Neo-Assyrians. Additionally there is a mysterious and otherworldly hint of true transformation within this topic—a suggestion of the butterfly, the cocoon, and true transcendence from the body—although admittedly this miracle which did not quite come off properly. We will get to this as we look at flaying in art and religion.
High Fashion by Jean Paul Gautier
If you can stay with me, this week ends with a fun surprise on Halloween (which I have been working on for a long time and saving for you)…but there is some pretty dark territory to get through before then. Gird up your loins (no seriously, you may want to tie something protective around your flesh), tomorrow we are going back to the age of chariots and horror to spend some time with the neo-Assyrians. Aaaagh!
l’Écorché “The Flayed Man” ( Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1767, cast)
Donut in the Northern Gloom (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, Color Pencil and Ink)
As I promised, here are some sketches from my little book which I carry around with me and draw in. The first one, above, is another one of my enigmatic donuts. This one seems to exist in the gloomy darkness of evening. A fire burns on the horizon as a grub-man calls out to a woman with a scientific apparatus. The reindeer seems largely unconcerned, by these human doings. In the picture immediately below, an orchid-like flower blooms by some industrial docks. Inside the pedals it offers rows of cryptic symbols to the viewer.
Fragmipedium (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
Here is a quick sketch of Manhattan’s San Gennaro festival. I walked to the corner of the street to draw the lights, wile my roommate got her fortune read by a jocular and likable (yet ingeniously avaricious) fortune teller located in an alcove just to the right of the composition!
San Gennaro in Little Italy (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
I sketched a cornucopia with some invertebrates while I was waiting in line at the post office (there was only one clerk who had to deal with a vast line of Wall Street characters sending elaborate registered packages around the world). It was not an ordeal for me–I had my sketch book, and was getting paid to wait in line! The guy beside me stopped playing with his infernal phone-thingy to watch me draw. Note the multiple mollusks which flourish in the painting. I think the ammonite has real personality
Cornu, cornus (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
Last is a seasonal composition which I really like (maybe because I used my new brown pen, which thought I had lost). A lovable land whale cavorts among autumn plants as monstrous invaders monopolize a cemetery. For some unknowable reason there is also a bottle gourd. The ghosts and bats are part of the October theme. As ever I appreciate your comments! Also I still have have some sketches (and general observations) from my weekend trip to Kingston, New York.
Autumn Land Whale and Miscellaneous Others (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
How do spiders manage all of these limbs?
Speaking of horrible nightmares, here are two photographs of my Halloween costume. I chose to dress as a redknee tarantula (Brachypelma smithi) a large terrestrial spider from the Sierra Madre mountain range in Mexico. Spiders of this species mature very slowly and become adults late, which makes it an ideal costume. In all seriousness though, these spiders suffer from an extreme sexual dimorphism. Males and females are of a similar size and look alike, but while female spiders can live for thirty years or longer, males are usually dead before they reach five. Talk about scary!
I’ll write something more serious about dreams, nightmares and our ability to understand the world tomorrow. In the mean time have some candy and enjoy the holiday with your friends and family! Happy Halloween!
As mentioned in last year’s post concerning pumpkins, the original Irish jack o’lanterns were not carved from the familiar orange gourds (which only made their way to Europe after the discovery of the Americas), but rather were cut from turnips, swedes, or mangelwurzels. I have illustrated this post with a little gallery of turnip lanterns. I was hoping to find a mangelwurzel to carve up for an original photo, but it seems like the hurricane has prevented adequate supplies of these medieval vegetables from reaching the city—so that will have to wait till next year. In the meantime, here is a folktale about how jack o’lanterns originated.
The story of the origin of the jack o’lantern is a stirring tale of greed, guile, and the restless undead. Jack was a trickster, a fraud, and an unrepentant sinner who roamed around Ireland scamming honest folks and selling mortgage-backed securities & other poorly structured equities. One day, Jack was running from a mob of creditors (which should immediately recommend the story to contemporary American mores) when he encountered the devil traveling along the bog road. Jack convinced Satan that it would be to the latter’s advantage to infiltrate society in a more subtle form than that of scary red guy with horns.
Jack’s plan was that the devil should pretend to be a golden coin. Jack could present this to the angry mob, who would then begin to argue and fight over the coin thus leading them inexorably into the devil’s clutches. The devil shapeshifted into coin form and presto, Jack grabbed him and stuffed him into a purse with a cross sewn on it (which he had probably stolen from a clergyman or a church-run orphanage). The devil was unable to escape Jack’s clutches. In order to get out of this predicament, Lucifer had to promise Jack never to collect his soul and take it to hell.
After many financial shenanigans and dodgy schemes, Jack eventually died–as all men must. His spirit wandered the gray earth in a dark fog, unable to find any succor or happiness in the lands of the living. At length he made his way to the gates of heaven but he was not wanted there and was chased off by saints and angels. Jack drifted through different realms but could never escape the chill of death and the inchoate miseries of the grave. Finally, defeated, he went to hell and begged for entrance.
Turnip lantern by Nathan deGargoyle.
But the devil remembered his promise (and was pleased by Jack’s misery). Satan barred Jack from hell and sent him on his way, but first he mockingly threw the specter a blazing coal from the inferno–which can never be extinguished. Jack tried to clutch the red ember and it burned and seared his flesh even though that flesh was ghostly and insubstantial. Yet the coal was better than nothing, so Jack carried it in his hands even though it caused him agony. Finally in a flash of inspiration, the con-man snatched a turnip from a garden and carved it into a little lamp to hold the coal.
Jack never could find peace–his spirit still roams to this day, but over the different eras his lamp has become an enduring symbol of the Halloween season. The devil, however, greatly appreciated Jack’s plan to infiltrate society in the form of money and he made many bold innovations in this direction (while being always watchful to steer clear of churches and cleric’s purses). He’s probably lurking somewhere in my bank balance and in yours too.
Happy Halloween!
This blog has examined and analyzed many Deities of the Underworld, but we have always shied away from the principle dark deity of the three Abrahamic faiths, namely the Devil (aka Lucifer, Iblis, Shaitan, The Antagonist, The Prince of Lies, etc.). However if there were ever a day to cast an inquisitive eye on the Lord of Hell, it is surely Halloween, that strange day when paganism and Christianity mix and the veil between this world and the next is thin.
Actually, one of the reasons I have avoided writing about this dark deity is because even though the devil might be a familiar figure in the popular imagination, he is only a sketchy presence in actual scripture. In the Masoretic Text, the holy book of Judaism (which roughly equates with the Old Testament), the Devil never appears by name–although the books do contain a cunning serpent (in Genesis), a fallen star, and an adversary. The New Testament Gospels feature a more familiar devil–who tempts Jesus, promotes evil, and lays waste to the world–but the books never describe this anti-savior except as a tempter, a dragon, a dark prince, or an ancient snake. In the Quran, Allah created the evil jinn Iblis out of smokeless fire to cast evil suggestions into the heart of men. Hmm, this is theologically interesting–but where does the fallen angel with the red skin, the horns, the barbed tail, the dapper van dyke beard, and the goat’s hooves come from?
The apocryphal scriptures, those strange half-holy books which were omitted from the Bible, provide more of the story. The Book of Enoch gives us the story of the rebellion and the fall of Heave’s brightest and most beautiful angel. This is the source of Milton’s Satan, however the text does little to describe the appearance of Lucifer.
The Devil Sowing Mushrooms (Jacob de Gehyn II, 1565-1629)
Gothic paintings from the middle age shows us demons and dark winged beings (you can find old posts about such hellspawn here and here). Sometimes the devil appears as a winged monstrosity or a sort of dark bat-like angel, but he does not appear in the guise which is so popularly known now–the red man with the horns, the trident, and the hooves.
In fact the familiar portrayal of the red devil is comparatively recent—perhaps even modern–but the imagery used is based on the ancient Greco-Roman deity of Pan. Pan, the horned half-goat shepherd was a god of nature, fertility, and goat-herding in the classical world. Because of his licentiousness, bestial appearance, and paganism he was a longstanding target of the Christian church. In the nineteenth and twentieth century Pan became a focus of neopagan art and letters. Christian reaction to Pan’s resurgence resulted in his image being translated to that of Satan. The red color seems to have been thrown in for good measure.
Also a Corporate Shill
It’s clear the devil is a complicated figure whose attributes, appearance, and meaning have changed greatly depending on the time and the place. We’ll get back to him–the underworld god of the world’s great monotheistic faiths–but right now it’s time to leave theorizing about devils, demons, and spirits behind and to go out and join them.
Happy Halloween!
