Garden Watercolors

As you can imagine, this year, my garden has been a particular source of solace and inspiration!  Alas, spring’s explosion of flowers is already fading away for another year.  As always, I tried desperately to hold onto the beauty through the magic of art, but (also as always) the ineffable beauty slipped away as I tried to capture it with paint. In fairness, the true thrust of my artwork lately concerns the crisis of life in the modern oceans (which is a rather different subject than pretty pleasure gardens).

A few weeks ago I posted the watercolor paintings which I made of the garden’s cherry blossom phase.  Here are some little sketches I made during the tulip florescence which followed.

Leen Van Der Mark Tulips in Brooklyn (Wayne Ferrebee, 2020) Watercolor on paper

These tulips are called Leen Van der Mark, and they are my favorite (since they look even more Dutch than they sound).  Initially there were even more tulips than this, but the squirrels beheaded quite a lot of them.  The strange metal mushroom is some sort of industrial vent/fan thing. Probably best not to think about it too much.

The Broken Pot with Crabapple Blossoms (Wayne Ferrebee, 2020) Watercolor on Paper

Here is a melancholic picture of the non-flower part of the garden.  The neighbor’s cypress wall fell down in a spring gale revealing the wire, garbage, and urban chaos on the other side. I tried to capture the madness (along with the poignant broken pot and withered elephant ear), but I feel like I only managed to draw a blue halo around the fake plastic urn.

Bleeding Heart Sphinx (Wayne Ferrebee, 2020) Watercolor on Paper

There are some small casts of classical sculptures in my garden.  This little sphinx always topples over unless it is secured to a brick or a paver.  The strange taupe “hands” are meant to be hellebore flowers–which are actually that color but which possess a winsome troubling beauty wholly absent here (although I guess they are a bit troubling). Once again we can see bits of the detritus in the neighbor’s exposed yard.

Rhododendron in Spring Flower Bed (Wayne Ferrebee, 2020) Watercolor on Paper

Here is the opposite side of the garden,with some summer impatiens popping up.  I have forgotten what these orange and yellow tulips are called, but they remind me forcefully of my childhood (when I gave one to my schoolbus driver in kindergarten). The extreme right of the composition features a very beautiful and robust fern (although we can only see one of the surviving fronds from winter). In front of the frond is a species tulip, Tulipa clusiana, which is native to Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and the western Himalayas.  Those places are usually much scarier than Brooklyn, so perhaps it will naturalize and take over.

Thanks for looking at these pictures.  I am a flounderist rather than a garden painter, but it was good to have a pretext to just sit in the sunny garden and stare at the flowers for hours.  I will see if I can take the watercolor set out to the stoop and do a street scene as summer gets closer.  The police have been scuffling with quarantine scofflaws out front, so that painting might actually be an exciting picture (if I can watercolor fast enough to paint a near-riot).  Speaking of which, stay safe out there and best wishes for continuing health and some floral joy of your own.

 

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Tutu

This is the guardian god Tutu.  Tutu is a god from the later period of Ancient Egyptian culture (indeed, the statue above may come from the Greco-Roman era…or even the Byzantine era of Egypt).  Tutu was a son of the mysterious and dangerous goddess Neith (a creator goddess from outer darkness) but he was more familiar and comforting than Neith: Egyptians thought of Tutu as a god who protected mortals from Neith’s other more dangerous children–demons and nightmares from the world of darkness.  Originally Tutu was a protector of tombs, but over the centuries he morphed into a guardian of sleep who protected slumbering commoners from nightmares.  I really like this statue because he seems like a friendly (but maybe slightly silly) dream guardian.  Although he has a cat’s body, his elongated torso makes me think of a dachshund  and his pudgy hangdog face reminds me of Rodney Dangerfield or some such sadsack comedian.  Let’s not even talk about the scorpions on his feet!

But I guess any protection from nightmares is better than none, and Tutu was popular in his day, during the twilight fadeout of Egypt’s ancient gods.

Happy Anniversary/April Fish/False News Day

Happy April Fools Day—or Happy April Fish! (as it is known in France).  This is a special day for several reasons.

Most importantly today is the anniversary of Ferrebeekeeper which came into existence 7 years ago today!  Since then, there have been lots of snakes, Goths, catfish, and colorful stories.  I have gotten some things completely and utterly wrong, but I have always tried to do my best and be honest and keep the content coming, even when I was tired or sick or sad at heart.  This is the one thousand five hundred and twelfth post!  That’s a lot of clams and crowns! To celebrate, I am putting up three flounder-themed artworks (literal poissons d’Avril) and I am also announcing the rollout of a bizarre and compelling new online toy to appear here soon.  I won’t tell you what it is (although I guess a prophet could tell you) but I will drop hints during next week’s blog posts.

Unless you are a Dagon-worshiper or a Micronesian, April Fish is one of the few fish-themed holidays on the calendar and so it is very precious for me, as a fish-themed artist.  Additionally, today celebrates being careful in the face of obviously fake news stories.  Now lately there have been lots of weird propaganda statements and transparent lies issuing from certain albescent domiciles in Washington DC, so the waters are even more muddied than usual (almost as if antagonists to the east are deliberately throwing up lots of lies and fake stories to make the real news seem suspect to people who are not very good at reading), but it is wise to be eternally on guard.  Getting to the bottom of things is difficult, but a good rule of thumb is that real news is messy and complicated and offers more questions than answers (and lots of seeming contradictions), whereas self-serving puffery is generally gloriously simple and shifts all blame onto some third party (like Freemasons, foreigners, witches, or journalists).

Thank you all so much for reading.  I treasure your attention and your patience. Forgive me for being so tardy in responding to comments and kindly pardon my errors or mistakes in judgement.  Keep reading and looking and I will keep on writing, drawing, and floundering.  There are glorious things ahead for all of us.

The Mystery Iris

Batik Iris

Irises are flowers in the genus Iris.  They are named after the Greek goddess Iris [ed. So far this seems kind of circular] who traveled on rainbows which were also known as irises.  Thus the familiar beautiful garden flowers are known by the Greek word for rainbow because they were available in a whole rainbow of colors.

Other People’s Beautiful German Irises

This is all deeply relevant because four years ago I bought a beautiful iris and planted it in my garden. It started as a little green sprout and then, through the subsequent years grew into a magnificent thicket of sword shaped bright waxy leaves—but it never bloomed.  Time worked its indignant wiles on my memory and I forgot what exactly what variety I had bought.

“Freedom Song” Iris

This year, finally, a bud sprouted on the iris!  I have been so excited to find out the color of the mytery iris.  I scoured the internet trying to figure out what I had bought (the irises pictured above “Batik” and were some of my guesses).  There was even a dark moment when I thought about how quixotic my aesthetics can be and I feared I had bought a huge brown hypnotic werewolf iris!

“Spiced Tiger” looks pretty much like a werewolf to me

But it turns out that the me of four years ago, made at least one good choice: here is the beautiful mystery iris as it appears now in my garden (along with my sphinx sculpture):

My Iris! The picture doesn’t do it justice at all. It is so lovely…

It is darkest violet edging into black with furry deep purple beards!  I am pretty sure it is called “Night Ruler” which sounds like an evil cleric or a death knight!  Yes!  Sometimes my past choices come back to haunt me, but for once that guy did something really amazing and nice!  I love this iris!  Here is another picture of it which I drew.

Iris and Greek Sphinx (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil on paper)

“Night Ruler” has awakened my heart to a lust for irises—but any actions I take will require another four years to yield results and by then I will no doubt be living on a tropical beach in Greenland or fighting our robot overlords…or worse I will have again forgotten what I picked out and I will be forced to live beholden to the unfathomable whims of who I used to be.

“Night Ruler” photographed by a professional

Riddles

Oedipus and the Sphinx (by Francois Xavier Fabre)

The Sphinx, another daughter of Echidna, was a monster with a human head (and torso), a lion’s body, the wings of an eagle, and a serpent for a tail.  Although the Egyptians and the Cypriots had long mythological traditions incorporating many different sphinxes, to the Greeks the Sphinx was one individual monster sent by Hera (or possibly Ares) to torment the city of Thebes.  She sat on a bluff outside the city and accosted travelers with a question.  When they were unable to answer correctly, she sprang down and strangled them to death. The question she asked is probably the most famous riddle in existence, “What goes on four legs in the morning, on two in the afternoon, and on three in the evening?”

Long-suffering Oedipus may have been accursed by ghastly fate but he alone was able to see through the monster’s abstract symbolism and give the correct answer—man, who crawls on all four as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and leans on a cane in his dotage. The sphinx had really counted on the metaphoric “day” to throw people off.  In fury and despair she hurled herself to her death once her question was answered.

The riddle challenge is ancient and its roots wind down into the advent of literature (and probably long before).  There are riddles in the bible and in Sumerian epic poetry. The internet, however, has fundamentally changed the challenge.  Back in the eighties if someone asked you a riddle and you were stumped, that was it.  Either you had to beg them for the answer, or you were out of luck.  Now you can always scour the web until you find the answer.  Here are a few of my favorite riddles.  The first is a somewhat frustrating riddle from the bible [hint: imagine you are a long-haired killing machine].  The second was asked to me by my first lover (I could never solve it and she wouldn’t tell me the answer—I finally had to ask my friend Adam for a solution).  The third was by literary giant Jonathan Swift who famously loved riddles. The fourth is a Stephen King riddle and my personal favorite (quiet you highbrows!).  I made up the fifth and sixth myself–which explains why the meter is more important than the meaning.  The last riddle is of course from Lewis Carroll.  Good luck!  I’ll give you the answers on Sunday:

1. And they said unto him, Put forth thy riddle, that we may hear it. And he said unto them, Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. And they could not in three days expound the riddle. And it came to pass on the seventh day, that they said unto Samson’s wife, Entice thy husband, that he may declare unto us the riddle, lest we burn thee and thy father’s house with fire: have ye called us to take that we have? is it not so?

2. What does God never see that a king sees seldom, that we see every day?

3. We are all very little creatures;
all of us have different features.
One of us in glass is set;
One of us you’ll find in jet.
Another you may see in tin,
And a fourth is boxed within.
If the fifth you should pursue,
It can never fly from you.
What are we?

4. With no wings, I fly. With no eyes, I see. With no arms, I climb. More frightening than any beast, stronger than any foe, I am cunning, ruthless and tall; in the end, I rule all.

5. It’s short on spring but long in fall.  It has a bluff that you can’t call.  It has a wall but lacks a roof.  It has a foot that’s not a hoof.

6. Devours muck but has sweet breath. Arrives with love and then with death.

7.  Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Um...can I have another hint?