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Every year when the cherry blossoms bloom, I like to draw and paint pictures of the garden. Although I am never satisfied with the pictures when I am working on them (since they only capture the tiniest fraction of the garden’s beauty), I am often pleased later in the year. It is almost like canning fruit: fresh fruit is obviously much better, but at least you have a little preserved portion of the heavenly taste later on. Additionally, painting the same subject year after year also provides a sort of benchmark to assess the media and techniques I am using. At any rate here are two of the pictures I painted. Above is a full watercolor sketch of the yard and below is a little drawing in pink, gray, and black ink which I made in my pocket sketchbook. Let me know what you think!
Here is a watercolor picture from my the little moleskine sketchbook which I carry around. A pompous, three-legged grandee makes his serene progress through a palace landscape. Around him are fawning moth courtiers and little fairies (as well as a horrified little flatfish who has somehow wound up in the garden’s reflecting pool). Although it is good to poke fun at the airs of aristocrats, my favorite part of the picture are the fluffy pink flying fox in the center and the ancient monotreme. Watercolor is not my finest medium, but maybe if I keep trying to capture fantastical foibles with the set I carry in my bag, I will keep improving…
This past Friday/Saturday was the annual Pratt Drawathon, a 12 hour event which is one of the highlights of the New York City art year. I should clarify: the event is not a highlight of the New York art world year. The drawathon is not a place where elite moguls drink wine from airport cups and buy multi-million dollar status-items to embellish their hegemony. The drawathon is, instead, a draftsperson’s event where Pratt students and other people who love to draw get together and draw all night. Mostly the artists are young fashionable 18-20 year olds with fluorescent hair and strange stylish raiment who struggle away at capturing the likeness of the models within the media rubric of whatever undergraduate project they are currently working on. Yet the greater New York art ecosystem knows about it too; so you also find peculiar outsiders dressed like janitors who draw like Raphael.
This year, I worked for 9 hours at my spreadsheet-themed dayjob and showed up to squeeze in among the miscellaneous artists and do some pencil sketches to stay limber as an artist (it is also nice to draw naked people sometimes instead of allegorical flatfish). After midnight the event also features pizza, caffeinated beverages, and live drummers to keep everyone’s energy up. But alas, this year my energy was flagging and my back was sore as I squirmed on the drafting stool. I was feeling sorry for working all day and drawing all night. That’s when I a model I hadn’t seen before came in and gave me a new jolt of energy…not because they were a 19 year old beauty unstained by time’s cruel tutelage (although such models indeed participate in the drawathon), but for the opposite reason. A man older than John McCain came in and then held stock-still for heroic long poses. Holding perfectly still sounds easy in theory, but as anyone who has been to Methodist church can tell you, it is exceedingly difficult in practice. Yet the heroic model easily stood like a statue in the airless room. At one point the man jumped up on a teetering bar stool and stood with his feet close together balanced and motionless for twenty minutes as the assembly gasped and begged him to be careful and not to fall and break something. “You better draw fast then!” is all he said.
Not only was this strange muse indefatigable and brave, he was also generous. After the pizzas arrive the event loses its coherence until about one o’clock when the proctors dragoon it back into shape. There are always some artists who wolf down their pizza and wait impatiently for things to get started. The model (who was named Mike) came in and said, I’ll pose until things get started again, if anyone wants to draw.”
One has to be impressed by the fortitude and bravery of anyone who can pose nude in front of strangers at all (I am not sure I could). To jump into such a career later in life is to truly overcome the prejudices of society and the indignant dictates of the aching spine. Mike seemed like he was having a great time. He was friends with the models and the artists. Even more, he was a friend to art (though I am, naturally dissatisfied by my drawings…speaking of which, I am sorry I cut off his feet on this last image–my scanner is only letter-sized).
So am I saying that my hero is a weird naked old man? I guess I am. The combination of strength, fortitude, generosity, and bravery are hard to gainsay.
I am sorry that these pictures don’t do him justice, but my back was tired from sitting in a comfy office chair all day. It’s a reminder that life is short, but opportunities are more diverse than you think. And it is a reminder to get to work! If Mike can pose 12 hours straight, from dusk till dawn, all of us can get out of your comfortable ruts and accomplish anything.
It has been a while since I blogged about my garden—which is a shame since it has been unusually beautiful this year. Alas, I am not an especially good photographer, but here are two little garden pictures so you can relive the end of May and the beginning of June with colored pencil drawings.
Night Ruler Iris (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink on paper)
Here is “Night Ruler” the dark violet iris which I blogged about last year. It had about two good days before a rainstorm knocked down the 4 foot flower spikes—but they were two GOOD days. There is hardly a flower more beautiful than the near-black German iris.
Livin’ Easy Rose (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink on paper)
Here is another beautiful flower, a floribunda rose named “Livin’ Easy” which is sort of a fluorescent coquelicot color. It is hard to get the vibrancy of the color of this beautiful little rose (and even more difficult to capture the heavenly smell). Maybe you will have to imagine the joy of rose season here in late spring/ early summer.
Brooklyn Heights (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink)
Here are three little pictures from the sketchbook book I carry around with me. The first picture is a view across the East River from the Wall Street Wharf. In the second picture dark shadows and monsters are calling out my name. Hmm…With typical art world narcissism, I took the title of today’s post from this picture.
Shadowy Friends (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink)
Finally here is a radiant sky deity enjoying some beer and a doughnut. He is attended by doting cherubim and towering heavenly clouds as he partakes. Only a lamprey and a fly spoil the image somewhat. A plover beholds the entire tableau with amazement.
Skygod Doughnut (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink)
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)
I had two artistic New Year’s resolutions. The first was to create a lot more art…and that I have done! The second was to get better at showing and marketing—to master the shiny outward trappings of being an artist…and there I have not done quite so well. So today’s post is a…well, it’s a lifestyle post (sigh). Let me explain: sometimes it seems like contemporary art is more about puffy biography than about the actual art itself. It causes me to grind my teeth in frustration when I see whole articles about where artists live and the cool things they do with their spare time—which then wholly gloss over the content of their work.
Then it sort of occurred to me that…title insurance and medieval history aside, I actually live in the bustling heart of Brooklyn and I have a wide group of amazing and particular creative friends. Maybe I AM one of these Brooklyn bohemians who everyone is always celebrating and deploring. So I decided to show you the sketches from my little book from over the long weekend!
Twilight Bed-Stuy Before the Parade (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil and ink)
On Sunday night, my friends who are amazing lingerie designers from Puerto Rico (in addition to being gifted expressionists) invited me to their party in Bed Stuy. It was a delightful fete with Slovenian computer geniuses, all sorts of sundry models, tart-tongued Irish folk, and Japanese film producers! Additionally, it was on a high terrace overlooking the street, so I got to watch Afro-Caribbean bikers doing wheelies down the street and see people getting ready for the West Indies Day parade. Above is the color pencil sketch of Marcus Garvey Avenue—you can see a Caribbean flag vendor there in the corner (the actual vendor was sort of balled up like a spider—but his colorful flags were very noticeable).
Sachiko (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil)
Unfortunately I am not as breathlessly cool and bonelessly insouciant as the artists in the “New York Times” and “Art in America”…so when I finished sketching and went to have a well-deserved black olive, I knocked the entire bowl of olives off the table and down a fellow guest’s back. Vasari never talks about these awkward moments…Fortunately the victim of my fumbling was a convivial person who asked if I could sketch her grinning rapidly moving friend. Such a circumstance is never ideal, but I think I did fairly well (although I failed to notice the teddy bear with a horrifying skull-face on her blouse until after I had drawn her.
Sketch of Coney Island (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, color pencil)
On Labor Day I rode my bike over to Coney Island and sketched some fellow beach goers before taking a dip in the green brine. I didn’t want to make people feel (more) self-conscious at the beach (nor did I want to get beaten up by Russian girls for staring at them) so my beach-goers are sketchy composites. I did get the color of the water and the annoying banality of the sky banner down (not to mention a pretty accurate drawing of, um, the Staten Island coast).
The frustrating thing is that Ferrebeekeeper’s readership is much more sophisticated than the characters who pretend to read the New York Times, so my readers will undoubtedly recognize this article as a bunch of fluff to introduce my weekend drawings. However this awkward little essay does begin to hint at how much I love New York. The popular image of Brooklyn as a trust-fund paradise, fails to do justice to the real Brooklyn I know–of striving entrepreneurs, crazy visionaries, immigrants, writers, and, yes, artists.
Oh! As always I would love to have your feedback!
Strange Ocean World (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil on paper)
Well…it was another day that got away. What with work and dinner and the grind, I failed to write about beaked whales. Don’t worry: those magnificent diving experts cannot escape our pen forever, but, in the interim, we must fall back on my daily doodle book (which Ferrebeekeeper cognoscenti know is a little moleskine sketch book that I carry around and draw in during my spare time). I have a big sarcophagus-shaped pencil tin too—which is full of colored pencils and markers to bring my drawings to life. The first sketch however (above) only required one “Blue Denim” colored pencil. It’s a little unclear, but I think it is a picture of the future oceans filled with bathyspheres, synthetic ocean life (to replace the fish we are recklessly killing off), and ships driven by fanciful propulsion. Synthetic beings and post-humans fly through the weird clouds of this strange ocean world. In fact, maybe it’s not Earth at all, but somewhere else entirely—an ocean world of oddly familiar alien marvels.
City with Glowing Crystal (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink on paper)
Next is another troubling pastiche of nature and technology. A happy monster ambles by a shambling city while a gambling demon tosses dice at a magic crystal. Reptiles and weeds fill up the foreground as strange elongated opossums creep in from the sides. It’s just like now! This might as well be a CNN photo about the 2016 election. This image may need to be colored in. What do you think?
Succulent Fruit (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, Colored Pencil and Ink on paper)
Finally, thanks to enthusiastic comments from my favorite readers, I included more fruit. One of my tasks at my new day job is overseeing the fruit supplies for a big office full of desk jockeys who spend all day looking at important documents. Because of ancient precedent, almost all of the fruit is bananas, and my colleagues beg piteously for different fruit. I have provided their wants…in this fantasy drawing which shows a succulent world of juices, seeds, and glowing tutti-fruit color. It could also be that there is a statement here about our world of agriculture, selective breeding, transgenic alteration, and over-consumption…or possibly it is just a fun doodle I made at lunchtime. As always, thanks for looking at my little artworks. I treasure everybody’s comments (though I realize I have been slower than usual to respond). Let’s keep enjoying the rest of summer. I’ll keep drawing (and the post about beaked whales will appear soon). Cheers!
Spring Soccer (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil and ink)
OK…today features two more wacky sketches from my little book. I promise I will have a different topic tomorrow and not keep putting up these oddities! Here is a children’s soccer game which I drew in a park in Chinatown in spring. I wish I had captured the NY Chinatown flavor of the afternoon better—there was a very strange older lady loudly singing idiosyncratic songs in Chinese and passing out leaflets while two older gentlemen accompanied her on traditional musical instruments. However whenever I chanced to look in their direction, they certainly noticed, and sketching them was out of the question. Don’t worry, I gave them a few coins for the serenade and they seemed delighted!
Inner Shamanism (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil and ink)
I also drew the peculiar chemical factory innards of a mysterious shamanistic beast. Unfortunately I don’t really know what else to say about the surreal little pastiche…but it certainly features a jaunty-looking squid (although my favorite part is the magenta sky filled with ephemera).
We’ll get back to history, crowns, and/or furry beasts tomorrow!
Funny Sketch of Giants (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
This year, I have been carrying a small sketchbook and some colored pencils around with me and doodling in it. Here are three small drawings/sketches that I made when I was doing other things. I sketched the mountains with the giant, the fountain, and the goblin on the subway (although I colored some of it in at my desk afterwards). The picture of lower Manhattan comes from the picture window on the 9th floor of the Brooklyn courthouse from my day of jury duty (don’t worry I wasn’t skiving from my civic duty–but there was a lot of downtime). I sketched the donut baby while I was talking to a friend about stickers and Philistines (Biblical and otherwise) so it may have been influenced by that peculiar conversation.
Sketch of Lower Manhattan from Courthouse (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
Kindly let me know what you think! I’m afraid have been running around trying to figure out my new job, so please forgive me for my tardy responses to comments during the past week. I love comments & I promise I will answer everybody. Just give me a moment to figure out how everything works!
Strange Priests with Donut (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
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