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Hey, remember that flounder artwork which I worked on for arduous months and months, and then published here on Earthday 2019? Nobody commented on it and then it sank into obscurity!

Well, anyway…I was tightening it up a little bit and polishing up some of the edges, when I noticed that it has a tiny turkey in it! Since it is already almost midnight here in New York, I thought maybe I would share another detail from the larger drawing in anticipation of Thanksgiving.

I better get back to work cleaning up this drawing. Let me know if you think of anything I left out and we will talk tomorrow!


As longtime reader know well, Ferrebeekeeper has always been impressed by the great, beautiful, sacrificial bird of the Americas–the turkey! Although these days, the United States seems to lead the world in turkey fixation (we have an entire month dedicated to the creature), turkeys were actually domesticated 2000 years ago in in central Mesoamerica.
Are there some contemporary Central American art objects that depict the noble bird in all of its majesty, pathos, and silliness (preferably with lots of eye-popping colors)? I am so glad you asked! The southern Mexican state of Oaxaca is renowned for its brilliantly colored hand-carved animals made of wood (among many other extraordinary creative traditions). Among the glowing menagerie, turkeys have a special place.






Here are some pictures of lovely Oaxaca turkeys shamelessly lifted from various places around the web. I hope they will lift your spirits and start to get you in the mood for the great feast. I also hope they will remind you of the long heritage of turkey cultivation and worship in western hemisphere. Enjoy the gorgeous carvings and I will start to think up an appropriate turkey theme long post for this long year.

During the Civil War, pennies were rare because of the wartime demand for metals. In the Northeast and Midwest, private parties minted tokens to fill the demand (which the Federal Government hated and banned in 1864). Here is a Washington Market exchange token from that era featuring a magnificent turkey on the obverse (with vegetables and a mildly subversive “live and let live” motto on the flip side). I am running out of things to say about turkeys, but looking back at this tiny slice of our numismatic past is a good way to enter the Thanksgiving season, and we’ll see if we can find one more good post about the noble sacrificial birds before the great feast. Gobble gobble! Enjoy your plentiful pennies and let’s kep the country unified!
I’m sorry i didn’t write a post yesterday. I had a cold, and while I managed to stumble through my workday, I just fell asleep when I got home. I’ll keep today’s post short and sweet by concentrating on two things which everyone loves: turkeys and money. Turkeys are a personal favorite animal of mine–they are large beautiful galliform birds which I have written about at length. Now I don’t know nearly as much about money, but what I have heard makes me think I would like it. So, as an early Thanksgiving treat, here are some coins with turkeys on them.
The first two examples are quarters–from Louisiana of all places (my native West Virginia, a place filled with wildlife, got stuck with a bridge.)
The third example is apparentlyfrom Saba. At first, I thought Saba sounded made up–but then I noticed that the coin had “five” written on it in Dutch. Sure enough this is an island in the lesser Antilles, and you can totally buy something there for this amazing turkey coin.
Today amidst the internet flotsam and jetsam, there was a post about archaeologists discovering this exquisite mosaic in Şanlıurfa, Turkey. There are two male and two female figures surrounded by beautiful decorative frames of interlocking geometry. It is not known who the figures are–perhaps we will never find out–but look how expressive and amazing these ancient portraits are!
What is now the Turkish town of Şanlıurfa was once Edessa, capital of the kingdom of Osroene. The city has an ancient and complex history, but between 100 AD and 600 AD (which is the rough age estimate for this mosaic) it was a vassal state first to the Parthian Empire and later to the Roman Empire, before becoming part of the Byzantine Empire. Later on, in medieval times, Edessa would be taken by the Sassanid Empire, the first Caliphate, the Crusaders…and on and on and on.
However this mural seems (to me) to be an artwork of Osroene, where the Syriac dialect first developed. Syriac literature and culture flourished there. These people lived and died and were buried in rocky tombs (which were then buried beneath the Castle of Urfa and forgotten…till now.
The Precious Night Turkey (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, Mixed Media)
Longtime readers know that one of my favorite animals is the turkey. I am not alone. We Americans have a whole month dedicated to devotions of the magnificent bird: the turkey is literally at the center of our third (or second?) most important festival. However there is a distinctly Aztec aspect to the turkey’s key role in the holiday. The fowl is not just a sacred animal of autumn—it is a sacred sacrifice of the dying year.
I love turkeys. I love their appearance. I love their personalities. I love their furtive mastery of the eastern woodlands. I…uh…I love their flavor. A lot. This strikes me as a noteworthy juxtaposition of its own: a troubling aspect not of turkeys, but of humankind. Our kindness is always streaked through with appetite. Our admiration is dark and terrible.
Anyway, I figured I had better make an artwork to capture some of these mixed feelings (and as a personal devotion to the consecrated bird). Here is a picture of Chalchiuhtotolin, the jeweled night turkey of the Aztecs. You can revisit the post here—the deity is a trickster, a sacrifice, a shapeshifter. I made it with paper cutouts, markers, colored pencils, and rhinestones—in the artistic style of an alimentary schoolchild, er, I mean an “elementary” schoolchild. I wanted it to be like a Faberge jeweled egg, glistening in the purple night, but perhaps I should have made it more Aztec instead of Rococo.
Ominously, as I was pasting it all together I accidentally tore off the head (you can see the seam of where I glued it back if you blow up the work). It was an artistic mistake—but it works perfectly to capture the true ritualistic nature of November’s spirit animal.
I promised a Fourth of July post, but one of my old friends came back to New York for a weekend after a decade abroad, so there was catching up to do (plus eating cherries and watching decorative explosions in the sky) and I missed writing a post. The recollections of erstwhile times reminded me that this blog has changed quite a bit too–we used to feature a lot more posts about turkeys–magnificent American fowl which dominate the poultry-yard, the dinner table, and the month of November, I decided to present a retro-post of patriotic turkeys as a belated Independence celebration–the founders never really meant for Independence to be celebrated on the fourth–so maybe we can respect their wishes with these star-spangled red-white-and-blue birds. Happy July. It doesn’t get better than enjoying some decorative birds in summertime!
Any purists who are tutting disapprovingly about how turkeys should stay in their lane ought to be reassured that I will blog about them plenty when November rolls around. I’m really fond of the big galoots!
Well, it’s already Thanksgiving…2015 will be here before you know it. This year I’m staying in Brooklyn instead of going home to the fields and hardwood forests of Appalachia, but I’ll definitely miss visiting family, going hunting, and seeing all of the goodly farm creatures. I probably should have organized things better, but to be frank, organization is really not my métier. How does everybody do so well with all of these infernal lists, and applications, and invoices, and calendars, and spreadsheets? Anyway, to celebrate the holiday, here is a summertime watercolor picture of the family farm. The trees look a bit crooked and a bit too green…but they were crooked and extremely green in real world (plus I didn’t realize I was sitting on an anthill when I first chose the location—so I was painting faster and faster). Of course there was no wild turkey running through the painting–at least not that I could see—however they are supremely canny at blending in when they want to be (and I did find some feathers at the entrance to the forest). The snake, chipmunk, and skulking frog are likewise inventions, although they are definitely out there in the woods. I should really have painted an anthill: those guys were very much present!
I’m sorry I don’t have a November painting which show the beautiful browns, russets, and grays of the woodland. The wild turkey would look extremely good against such a backdrop! But the ants were bad enough—I don’t even want to think about watercolor in snow, sleet, and freezing rain…
Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers! I hope you enjoy your turkeys and have a lot to be thankful for. All of you foreign folk will have to make do with my best wishes and imagine how succulent the turkey and mashed potatoes taste. But wherever or whoever you are, you should know that I am most thankful for my readers! You are all the best!