The artist's muse and The Art of Eating

 

A proper plate of cassoulet. Last week, mine looked nothing like that. A cautionary tale. (Wiki commons photo)

The Art of Eating is one of my favorite books on food. It was written eons ago by the late MFK Fisher, an American food writer but not a chef. Her descriptions of her time in France are erotic...and she says not one word about anything sexual...and so are her descriptions of food. Some of her recipes are glorious. Others are pedestrian at best. 

Somehow, that's comforting. Most of us eat, most days, in very pedestrian ways. And then we get a wild hair, and create in the kitchen. I often wonder whether my past 40 years of creating new recipes was, mainly, a deflection of my desire to paint. But I don't wonder too long, because, after all, we have to eat.

But sometimes, we exceed even the pedestrian potential of MFK Fisher on her worst day. Usually I do it when I decide to use someone else's recipe instead of my own for a dish I've made up, improved on and generally added to a fool-proof repertoire. Last Sunday, I did exactly that.

***

When I was a young writer, in Manhattan, I had heard of a magical dish called cassoulet. The name alone was so redolent of the France I was, at that time, still dying to see that I hungered for it, despite the fact that I don't like beans much.

One Eastertide, when the tide of our fortunes had turned and royalty checks were rolling in, I decided it was time to go to the East Village to a French restaurant and have cassoulet.

I adored it.

I decided, like mixing paint colours, that I could approximate it, and approximate it I did. Believe it or not, I got a darn good dish out of the following: tinned Northern beans, peperoni slices, tinned chicken breast, tinned deviled ham, spices and herbs on hand, a tablespoon of tomato paste, and lots of browned chopped onions.

Naturally, I moved on from there and developed a dandy cassoulet with canned Northern or Haricot beans, chorizo, organic herby sausages, chicken breast browned and sliced, a couple of browned duck legs, browned chopped onions, herbs and spices. No tomato. Nor did I cook it in the oven. I used a Dutch oven on the hob. Not classic, but darn, the stuff was always good.

But then I courted disaster. I read a recipe for REAL cassoulet online, and also the same food writer's quickie version of the dish. I won't mention his name because I don't want to give the miserable sod any ink...and also, I've judiciously forgotten it.

So, I went with his quickie version for last Sunday's guests, not wanting to actually spend three days at the task beforehand.

In 40 years of having dinner parties, that recipe resulted in the very first time I felt it necessary to apologize to guests for the sorry condition of the meal they were fed. It was watery in the extreme, and I had to ramp up the oven to finish it off. My oven being what it is--the builder version that came with this new house, and a wonder of horrid engineering--it burned a bit before it became something other than beans-duck-sausage-lamb soup.

However, the dessert--mine, all mine, from concept to execution--saved the day. What was it? Almond custard-style ice cream and lavender sorbet, each served on a round of marzipan and drizzled with rose syrup. (OK. I bought the rose syrup in the local olive/Middle Eastern store. But the rest was made here.)

I didn't paint much this week. I think my muse was damaged by that blasted recipe from hell. I know my digestion was...and my pride. It seems to me a lot of artists probably like to cook, since it's combining things and coming up with a new product. I think, though, I would advise them to be careful, if using someone else's food palette, to be careful of their muse.

Boids

My grandmother's birds, drawn by Laura yesterday with her brand new box of Crayolas! Sixty-four colors!

What's a boid?

See those blue things in the picture? Boids.

I never spoke Brooklynese, despite having been born in Brooklyn. I was raised in large part by my maternal grandmother who was French-Canadian by way of Montpelier, Vermont, and always claimed that she spoke the King's English. In fact, my memory suggests that her accent was quite bland, with most things pronounced exactly as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of American English would have specified. And thank goodness for that; regional accents mark one, especially in America which is much more stratified than the UK.

My grandmother also taught me many other things. She taught me how to sew. She taught me how to cook. She taught me that the ONLY appropriate colour for nail polish and lipstick for a respectable woman was red. Yes, I've violated that one! But I do attempt to keep the colours ladylike...which is not anti-feminist in light of the personal accountability and insistence on equality in meaningful things that she also taught me.

And she taught me how to draw birds.

I used to draw ALL the time. I used to make the neighbour boy, three years older than I, draw with me. If he didn't, I gave him a whack on the head with my pink plastic hair brush. I loved him, you see, and I was only three.

But I didn't know how to draw a bird in flight, so my grandmother showed me. I wonder if that's something everyone knew back then, how to represent birds in flight kiddie-style. I wonder if anyone knows it now. I wonder how many mothers, grandmothers, aunties and other significant adults sit down and draw with their toddlers. I should think it would be just as important for the toddlers' mental development as reading to them. It develops awareness of spatial relationships, observation skills, colour appreciation, curiosity about the world...all sorts of things.

But the emphasis has been so much on reading and maths the last couple of generations, I really wonder how many kids ever had the fun of seeing how Dad drew a cow and telling him that wasn't how cows looked; cows were bigger, or had horns, or their tails were longer and so on. My Uncle Eddie used to draw farm animals for me. His were really good. I particularly liked the pigs. All this was odd since the entire family had lived for generations in Brooklyn, where if there's one pig or ever has been since the invention of the motor car, I'd like to know about it.

Among the first cuts to school funding is always arts instruction. And yet, art offers so much in educational value, and even more in human values. Certainly, life is easier if one reads competently, and if one can do sums enough at least to balance the monthly budget. A smattering of science, geography...and so on. But why leave art out of it? Most students are not going to become physicists nor world explorers. Most will need to do something in their spare time; maybe art. They will need to decorate their homes: art. They will need to show their own kids how to have fun with finger paints and make a total mess of the house: art.

There is art in every aspect of human life and every aspect of human life needs art. If a person can do no more than paint my grandmother's birds on a cardboard box to decorate it as a gift, isn't that enough? To add some hand-painted primitive flowers to a crumbling kitchen wall that there's no money to repair? To draw something to entertain a sad child? Aren't those reasons enough to ensure that art is taught in schools? Then, when broke or the victim of poor planning or in need of a skill to improve a place or a life, the adult can come up with a creative way to cope because he or she is not afraid of art.

Art and socks

My husband's socks ALL look like the socks on the left and right.

Of all the hateful household tasks in the world, at the top of the list must be matching socks after doing laundry, folding or rolling them, and putting them away.

It's not difficult with my socks; I have socks in probably every colour except red. I even have purple socks. And some soylent green ones, although I do have three very similar pairs of black socks.

Kiddie--or artist?--socks

But my husband has only black socks. Well, except for the four dark blue ones and two brown.

And that's where art and socks intersect.

All his black socks are from only two manufacturers. One kind has a gold stripe woven into the toe; the other kind does not.

The socks were not all purchased at the same time. Thus, they have not all been washed the same number of times. Thus the dye has not faded to the same shade in all of them. Thus one cannot just grab two black socks with gold stripes and put them together. The dark blue socks further complicate matters, as they appear, at times, to be almost as dark as the more faded of the plain black socks.

I'm getting a headache....

More like stockings....but knitted like socks

I suspect Simon could just match up any two stripe-less socks and any two with the gold stripe, because he simply wouldn't care. After all, he would reason, they'll be hidden by trousers, mainly.  But for me, they must be an actual pair...or as close to it as the naked eye--an artist's eye, trained in seeing subtle tonal gradations--can manage.

It's a thankless task. I'm never sure whether to let the laundry pile up so I only have to do it about every ten days, at which point there are at least 20 matchable socks to deal with or more if he has done something like lawn-mowing and gotten a pair smelly halfway through a day, or more often so there are fewer socks.

Nor can the sock-matching be done in dim light, so I can't leave it for after dinner, even now when the sun is up until 9. I could drag it all into my studio, where the things that saves my sanity for painting, a pair of high-wattage full-spectrum lights, would help. But then I'd risk getting blotches of paint on all those black socks.

Corporation man socks.

Wait. This is a good idea. A tiny blot of cadmium yellow hue on one pair, some lovely Winsor Red on another, maybe some Naples Yellow on another, and so on. I could even mark the Gold Stripe socks on the stripe with green or blue.

I doubt Simon would notice. He didn't notice when the coppery red hair I had when we met had turned to dark brown before we got married, a period of about eight months. And he's a bit far-sighted, so it's unlikely he'd notice a couple of colourful dabs on his socks unless he happened to be wearing his reading glasses when he got dressed. Which will never happen.

Art and socks are much better bedfellows than I first imagined; I really intended to write about appropriate socks for artists. But as it turns out, bringing a little artistry to the socks of engineers turned out to be more valuable, at least to me.

Now, if someone can tell me how to prevent sock disappearance....so I don't end up with one purple sock with the mate turning up some weeks later from some mystical hidey hole in the laundry room....

Handmade granny socks?

(All sock photos Wiki Commons)

Purple bunnies

 (Wiki Commons)

One of my favourite art books has always been The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. He was an instructor at my alma mater, The Art Students League of New York, but eons before I got there. Still, I expect his teaching permeated the building, along with the century-old scent of turps and printer's ink and clay and fabric sizing and lousy food from the student-run cafeteria and grime from the New York streets that blew in the door and up the stairs to the dark, gray hallways lined with lockers lined with grunge And students.

I don't know why I picked up the book the first time, or where. One of the main features of the League was that there was no reading list. One learned by doing, not by reading. Still, since I'm also a writer, I'm a reader; I can't resist an art book, either instructional or coffee table.

I could have found the Nicolaides book at Lee's Art Shop, a huge emporium of art materials and books almost across the street from the League. Or it could have been in the now-vanished bookstore at 57th and Broadway. No matter. It helped me in the early years, and then I left it behind when we moved to the UK; we only shipped essential books, costs being what they are.

So, last week, I bought a new copy from amazon.co.uk. And I began to read it again.

"Through constant effort, patient groping, bit by bit, certain rules have been established relating to the technique of picture making. These rules are the result of man's ability to relate the laws of balance, which he has found in nature, to the business of making a picture," Nicolaides writes in the introduction.

Later, he writes, "Man can make only the rules. He cannot make the laws, which are the laws of nature. It is an understanding of these laws that enables a student to draw. His difficulty will never be a lack of ability to draw, but lack of understanding."

And from there, he goes on to advocate that which I think professionals in any art form do: Learn the rules, and then break them according to your understanding of the universal laws that apply to your art form.

If, for example, you wish to explore the possibility that finches generally fly upside down, at least in the green sky you are painting, your work will go better if you actually know what a finch looks like and have done enough learning of the rules to produce it, either realistically or in the abstract. If you know that grass is green and sky is blue, if you are going to break that rule, then you need to know that if you make them both green, there will be no difference and viewers will not get the point. And you do, as an artist, want them to get your point. Why else communicate with pictures?

Frankly, the part about breaking the rules has been the most difficult for me to achieve. It wasn't terribly hard to learn the rules and even to intuit and/or observe the underlying laws. But I am, by nature, fastidious and somewhat given to academic standards. For example, when I was in kindergarten and we were all told to draw Easter bunnies, the other kids drew green ones and pink ones and blue ones. Mine were all brown. The teacher asked me why I drew only brown bunnies. I told her it was because that's what color bunnies were; bunnies didn't actually come in pastel hues, something I knew at five years old and was willing to fight for.

I drew pictures with brown bunnies and green grass and blue skies and pretty flowers and all of it was, for a five-year-old, quite realistic. The problem is that I'm still doing it. And yet, photo realism bores me, and I have no patience to recreate what the camera sees. For me, that doesn't answer the musical question who gives a rat's ass. So my "realism" is compromised to begin with. 

I think it might be time to break out of the mold. In that vein, I ordered a box of 120 Crayola crayons last week. I was thinking about some of my favorite colors, among them leaf green and salmon and there was a sort of alizarin crimson--called something else by Crayola, but on those lines. I'm hoping when the crayons arrive I can relive my childhood, revise it and actually draw a couple of purple bunnies. You can call it artistic self-analysis, if you like. Or you can call it Fred for all I care.

But I'll let you know how it works out.

Purple neon bunny....from Wiki image by Picasa

LATE BREAKING NEWS: The Crayola Crayons just arrived!

The Colour Orange

I don't mind terracotta too much; it is closer to red than anything else, and Persimmon isn't too bad. The rest of them give me the heebie-jeebies.

I don't think I can have artful thoughts in the presence of the colour orange.

I've used orange on occasion; everyone has used orange on occasion. But here's the thing: A friend convinced me to try a new platform and its basic colour is orange.

Blogger's icon is orange, but you can alter everything else to suit yourself. Not so with the new site. Almost nothing can be changed, most especially all that orange. That site  is in beta test, so perhaps they will add functionality later. For now, though, I have concluded that the new site works when I want to do a political rant, but I can't even think about an art-oriented topic when its ugly orange home page is on my screen.

The meaning of orange

I looked up the meaning of orange to see if I could determine why the artist in me detests it so.

Here's what I found, with commentary in italics:

It is a power colour. I don't want that sort of power when I'm involved in art. It's too heavy.

It is a healing colour. Shouldn't art heal? So why would I loathe it?

It is said to increase the craving for food. Uh oh. Stop right there.

It also stimulates enthusiasm and creativity. Well there you go; it does precisely the opposite for me. Indeed, I would run and hide--or go nuts--if someone put me in an orange room.

All the information about orange above was found on Emily Gems website.

None of that information gave me a clue; if anything, it indicated I was far outside the norm in my reaction to orange. So I kept looking.

The colormatters website noted that:

"Orange is symbolic of autumn.

"Children all over the world are drawn to orange.

"Orange is the color (sic) of life rafts, hazard cones, and high visibility police vests."

I've never liked autumn. When I lived in New  York City, I loathed it so much, my husband decided that to save our sanity, we had to go to Key West--endless summer--for most of November. When we got back, it would be winter, and I don't mind winter.

I'm not a big "kid" person, either; I mean, they're fine--I've taught them in fact--but I don't go all gushy over them.

Somehow, visions of life rafts, hazard cones and police vests do not bring out the artist in me. Go figure.

But at least I was getting somewhere in understanding my antipathy to orange.

Locked in in orange, or locked out--depending

There were, on the same site, two more suggestions as to why orange does not appeal to me. First, it is the colour of prison uniforms in the United States. I used to be a citizen of the United States...you know, that nation that has a greater percentage of its population incarcerated than any other nation, including China with four times the US population and a reputation for being fairly miserable to its citizens. So perhaps that is an influence. Except that I've always disliked orange, and until recent times, US prison uniforms were usually gray.

Orange also stands for the Northern Irish Protestants; I am a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, and I frankly think Ian Paisley is a vicious, ignorant demon. So perhaps that has something to do with it. But as noted, I've never liked orange, and although we studied The Troubles in school in the United States, I think my dislike of the color predates that.

On the other hand, I completely adore freshly squeezed orange juice and squeeze oranges every single day when they're in season. I won't even buy bottled or frozen stuff; it's not orange juice. It's some sort of flavoured acid with bits in it. Ick. During non-orange season, my breakfast juice of choice is apple with elderflower.

I can come to no reasonable conclusions. I just don't like orange, and it completely freezes my muse. Completely. So I guess Blogger, which subjects me to only a tiny bit of orange, is stuck with me.

I did put up an art blog on the new site on Wednesday, and it got a lot more readers than it does on Blogger. But heck, I own the work, so maybe the answer is to write it here and re-post it on the new site, covering my eyes as I do so.