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Ghostly Sole (Wayne Ferrebee, 2019) ink on paper
I meant to post a weird evil clown flounder picture which I had (a “clownder”?), but, infuriatingly, I could not find it among my boxes of drawings. I suspect it will show up next year, during election season when we have forgotten all about evil clowns (rolls eyes). Anyway, for Halloween, I will just put up the drawing I was working on for All Soles Day, the biggest holiday in the flounderist’s calendar (?). It is a picture of a ghostly sole, on the bottom of the ocean surrounded by apparitions playing musical instruments and ethereal sea creatures and monsters. There are some other things in there as well. Hopefully it is becoming evident that my flatfish series of artworks represent an elegy for the dying oceans. Shed a pearlescent tear! But also remember: the oceans are in deep trouble, but they are not dead yet. Filled with plastic and floating Chinese fish factories and bleached coral and acidified warm water they still team with life. We could safe them and live together on a beautiful planet, but we will have to be better versions of ourselves. It is a chilling message for All Sole’s Day (and an unhumerous end to Halloween season) but it is the most important advice you will find on the internet, despite the fact that it is abstract and open-ended. Just look at the picture though, you wouldn’t want to live in a world with dead oceans would you…I mean even if you could.
I colored a flounder drawing I made last Halloween with watercolor and colored pencils. This is “The Sole and the Souls” (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, Ink, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper). It features a sole covered with parti-colored fungi swimming through a Roman cemetery of late antiquity. I think those might be Charun’s snakes in the sky (and his servitor dragging the gladiator into the darkness).
I have been working on a flatfish themed art project! There will be more to announce soon and great fanfare: I promise. However, for now, to tease the wonders that are to come, here are a number of small flatfish artworks that I have been making at lunch and on the train and during similar spare moments. Wordpress hates me with undying vehemence (which is to say, if I label a picture with its name, their program drags it off-center and makes it look ugly), so I am going to write the name in the body of the tex beneath each little fish, and write a short blurb. Please, please let me know what you think, even if it is a one word assessment and I will keep working on my big presentation! Oh–the picture at the top is: Bongo Flounder (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink on paper) it depicts a bongo turning into a flounder through the auspices of the horned god. A baffled yokel hunter watches in astonishment. Morphing animals are a big problem for me (sigh), so this image has deep personal meaning.
Baterpillar fluke (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink on paper): A Sumerian walking at night sees a mystical fluke surrounded by nocturnal garden creatures.
Arcane Flounder (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink on paper): An Armenian mystic walking at night contemplates the intricacies of a magical flatfish surrounded by arcane creatures.
BustaFlounder (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink on paper): a flounder parties too hard and is forced to re-live the disgraces of the 1980s New York art scene. A chained mastiff and disappointed prawn look on with weary resignation.
Flatfish in the Night Garden (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink on paper): through the intercession of various ancient deities, a hive of bees is allowed to plleneate at night. The relentless geometrical shape on the shimmering dab’s back indicates that such a work ethic may have inscrutible consequences.
Gnome City Flatfish (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink on paper): A small colorful city is overtaken by a fungal outbreak as winged beings fly by.
Hopefully you have enjoyed this little flounderful gallery. Like I said, get ready for some exciting news (hint, hint: the launch of an ancillary site for Ferrebeekeeper). keep on commenting and i will keep on floundering. Thanks!
Flatfishes are an order (Pleuronectiformes) of predatory fish found in oceans worldwide. There are over 700 distinct species in 11 separate (and sometimes very distinct) families. Familiar flatfish include flounder, turbot, plaice, sole, and tonguefish (to name only a few).
Flatfish undergo two great changes. First they hatch out of an egg and become transparent tiny fry living among the zooplankton. These baby flounder have an eye on each side of their heads–like all the other vertebrates. Then, when they reach adolescence, they change a second time in a bizarre way. One eye migrates over the young fish’s forehead. Half of their body becomes pale and smooth. To reach adulthood they abandon the vertebrate’s familiar symmetry and become strange asymmetric monsters.
(An Adolescent Flounder, as its eyes migrate and it becomes opaque)
Very few animals have asymmetry of any sort (wrybills, hermit crabs) and even fewer are asymmetric in a systemic way (sponges). Flatfish give up their symmetry on adulthood: they lose their ability to swim smoothly and see all around them…but, in turn, they gain prowess as lurkers. This helps them to hide in an ocean full of strife and peril. Equally importantly, it helps them to hunt.
Flatfish are exceedingly gifted predators. They thrive by eating unsuspecting fish, mollusks, arthropods, and worms which are scampering (or crawling… or propulsing?…or whatever) along the ocean bottom. Pleuronectiformes are powerful, quick, agile, and invisible. The horrifying hunting strategy of the flatfish is to lie perfectly still on the ocean bottom and gradually change color to match the substrate (they can match sand and pebbles and ripples and even chessboards). Then, when a happy little shrimp minces endearingly along the ocean floor, suddenly the land itself opens a huge maw and SNAP! delicious shrimp supper for the stealthy flatfish.
For all of their gifts as predators, flounders are hardly the apex predators of their watery ecosystems. They live in a world of super-predators: diving birds, grabby cephalopods, sharks, bigger fish, and cunning marine mammals. And that is to say nothing of all-consuming humankind: fisherfolk hunt for flounder with spears, traps, hooks, and nets.
The flatfish, like most teleosts, are being fished to oblivion (even as their habitats rapidly change due to thermal fluctuation, invasive species, pollution, and acidification). This troubles me for all sorts of reasons. It represents the growing doom in the world ocean, from whence came all Earth life and upon which all life depends. We evolved from teleosts. Flounder are distant cousins. Also I think they are beautiful in a bizarre way. Their asymmetry strikes me as amazing and alien, yet somehow completely appropriate, practical, and compelling.
Also, um, I like to eat flounder.
Anyway, I mention all of this because lately flatfish have supplanted doughnuts as the central fixation of my art. They represent life to me…and so I have been drawing them by the dozen (and I am working on a book of intricate pen and ink flounder). Here is a teaser flounder. More next week!
Benevolent Flounder (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, color pencil and ink)
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