It's all over, at last

Mangosteen

6/12. Mangosteen, oil on linen on panel, 7x5 in. SOLD

I do realize how annoying it can become to see blogs you've gotten familiar with sit untouched for a long time, so I'm going to tell myself to snap out of it and get back to posting. (I blame my inner recluse, again, and will try harder to keep the little bugger from climbing back into my head through the broken back window when it's dark. Once he's in there he's quite the tyrant.)

We noticed mangosteens at our Kroger store one day and I just had to get some. Over a decade ago, during my last visit to relatives in Indonesia, I tasted this out-of-this-world fruit for the first and only time, fresh off a tree. I think they grew on a tree but I may be remembering wrong, as the memory would become like a vision and the taste like a legend completely detached from the reality of the experience. It probably makes sense that, after all the excitement of finding them in an American supermarket then getting to cut one open for my wife to finally be able to taste these mysterious things that I had for years been unable to describe in words, I (and she) was a bit disappointed. Maybe it was because they hadn't come to room temperature, or that they were mangosteens from Thailand and maybe different from the ones I had in Indonesia. And it didn't help that it cost $10 for only four of them. Don't get me wrong, they are fantastically and exotically tasty (or tastily exotic?), and to my two-year-old daughter they will always be exotic because honestly I don't see us spending that kind of money again anytime soon on fruits that don't contain much actual edible fruit. But to my wife, because I had spoken of them so often so mythically, they were only just so-so. Wanting to understand better all this hubbub over mangosteens, she looked around on the Internet and landed on this amusing article. Thank god we didn't pay $22.95 for two.

So it was maybe because I had this disappointment fresh on my mind, or I was worried that it was too expensive a fruit to have sit unrefrigerated for too long, but I think I began the painting hurriedly and ended up laboring too much on it, getting caught up in the shell-like hardness of the skin and the shifting colors. Not that it doesn't capture the feel of a mangosteen, but I feel the painting was slightly tainted by my feelings toward the thing.

Perhaps it was fortunate that at about this time I did some more little pieces for Cameron Gray (his new show at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica opens tomorrow the 26th). It's interesting to see where my little tiles end up within a picture - in this piece from March (click "all sizes"), one of the more explicit ones forms the bright white of the girl's right eye. In all there are six tiles of mine - here's one detail. (Thanks to "C-Monster" for those Flickr photos.) Some of the recent ones, more innocent:

If I were teaching I might give students small challenges like these (working from reference photos), to help stay/get "fresh." I was amazed this time by how much quicker I was able to arrive at new color mixes, ones very different from what I'm normally used to. Serious "play" I guess.

Easy (rotisserie) chicken noodle soup recipe

Grocery store rotisserie chickens are a pretty good deal, considering that you can get a lot of use even from their scraps. Here's a simple recipe, culled from several sources, for when that chicken in your fridge is on its last legs. Overall time if I figured it all correctly: 50-55 minutes.

Once in a while I love a cool and challenging recipe, but I'm no gourmet - more like a lazy (and cheap) gourmand. This chicken noodle soup is so easy I daresay any yahoo can make it and come off looking like a fancy-pants. To date it's the only kind I've attempted from scratch, or mostly from. What's great about this method is that it cuts out the hours-long process of making a proper stock, but it tastes like you spent all day and is more satisfying than I can describe. I've made it quite a few times now and I'm proud to say my two-year-old absolutely loves it (and loves to get it all over her). If you like, you can add to it whatever half-empty bag of veggies happens to be sitting lonely in the freezer. It's about leftovers and is really versatile, you get the idea....

Note: This soup isn't exactly diet-friendly as it leaves in all the yummy goodness (=fat). To take half the day letting it cool so you can skim off the fat would defeat the purpose of this "fast" recipe.

Ingredients:

1 leftover store-bought rotisserie chicken
½ bag (6 oz.) extra wide egg noodles
2 quarts chicken broth (boxed/canned or from bouillon) + 1 quart water
2 big onions, diced
2 big carrots, peeled and sliced into rounds or half-rounds
2 big celery stalks, sliced
4 or more garlic cloves
2 tsp. fresh or dried thyme leaves
1 bay leaf
2 T. vegetable oil
salt and pepper

In a large stockpot, bring water and broth to a simmer over medium-high heat.

2 quarts is a lot of broth (for us) to have on hand, so I keep a jar of bouillon, e.g. Herb-Ox, or some other chicken soup base for making this recipe. If going that route, then per their directions (1 tsp. bouillon for every 1 cup water) that's 8 tsp. bouillon to make the 8 cups (2 quarts) of broth, or 2 T. + 2 tsp. bouillon. Which is just shy of 3 T., to keep things simple. Bring all of the water (3 quarts total) to a boil before adding the bouillon.

While the water is going, separate the remaining white meat from the chicken bones and skin and reserve this meat in the fridge.

To the simmering broth add the chicken bones with skin, pope's nose (or parson's/sultan's nose) and whatnot - the more chickeny stuff the yummier the soup. Drop in the bay leaf, and a couple or three or more cloves of garlic, lightly smashed (I like to throw a lot of garlic in as this is a good place to use up some of the little puny cloves that tend to accumulate). Add also 1 tsp. of the dried thyme and/or other compatible herb(s), or a couple fresh sprigs if you grow it and have some to spare. Go ahead, add whatever you think would make things yummy. Reduce heat to low/medium-low, partially cover and let simmer about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, chop up the onions, carrots, and celery; mince the remaining garlic, maybe 2 cloves. (It helps me to remember the number "2" for things in this recipe: quarts of broth, onions, carrots, etc.) Set all this aside, but here if you have any usable onion scraps, or those little center stalks of celery and especially the celery leaves, make sure to add those to the pot.

When the broth has cooked and become extremely yummy-smelling, pick out the larger bones and scraps, then carefully strain it through a colander into a large container or second pot (I line the colander with paper towels to help filter). Set this broth aside. Return main pot to the burner with heat raised to medium/medium-high.

Add oil, then the onions, carrots, and celery. Season well with salt and/or pepper. Stirring often to avoid browning, sauté until it just begins to soften, about 7-8 minutes; with a couple of minutes left add the minced garlic. Don't cook longer than this or the onions will become too sweet (you want only a hint of sweet).

Return broth back to the pot and bring back up to a boil. Add the egg noodles and boil according to the directions on the package, usually about 8 minutes. (If adding other vegetables I would probably do so at this point.)

Turn off heat, stir in the reserved chicken meat and remaining thyme leaves, and let it all hang out and become yummy together until it's time to eat.

Serves 8.

Management profoundly regrets and apologizes for the inconvenience and worries that have been caused; and Eddoes #2

5/6. Eddoes #2, oil on linen on panel, 5x7 in.


(in progress)

Well, I never thought I'd become one of those loathsome, horribly selfish people who could let their blogs languish for months with no explanation why. Originally I intended to stop for some soul-searching (whatever that means). I felt that I had been working too comfortably, that I still wasn’t getting at whatever it is I wanted to get at, if you get that. Most likely it started with my going to Charleston and seeing my friend and coming back and seeing a lot more great art online and getting annoyed with myself and with how I see (or don’t see) things. The old hermit in me said it was time to step away and hide out for a while, so I decided to put this (almost-)daily painting "project" face down and not feel too guilty about it.

I was telling myself I had to work out the composition of a new portrait of my daughter. Looking again at my old art history books reminded me of the enormous impact that Correggio, Bellini, and other Renaissance painters initially had on me, and it made me want to tackle something on a little larger scale in which I could play around more with light, do more subtle things. But I maybe just got more overwhelmed looking at more good stuff. And that portrait of Breagha never got started.

As my friend Gary put it, sometimes "life happens" - I found myself sidetracked by non-art projects (e.g. building a shoe rack for the narrow space by our front door, putting up some shelves, rearranging our computer work area). At some point though I helped do some tiny paintings for an artist in Southern California named Cameron Gray, who puts together these large mosaics with photos of body parts, food, and such things as reference (see a past show). Here are some:

A few of these are for a piece in a show opening July 26th from 6:30-8:30 at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, Bergamot Station. I find/found painting these to be great practice (matching value and color), even if I normally wouldn’t force that sort of thing on myself.

My hiatus hadn't exactly been a vacation, though I must say it has been nice after the kid's in bed to once in a while spend the rest of the evening in the same room with my wife, and not at my easel. And a lot of times I would get lost in a book about falconry or abstruse Old English stuff (which relate to the portrait I want to do), but sometimes I'd just watch news and get mad at the political coverage, which just meant that I was in a worse comfort zone and that I needed to get back. Time the dragon awoke and came out of his barrow....

So, back to the eddoes above - I can’t remember when, but one night at least two months ago I had started painting them, and they then sat there patiently waiting to recapture my attention. So the other night I finished the painting - though by this time the little things had shriveled considerably (getting moldy underneath) and were sprouting real thick, sharp-looking green shoots. It was hard to overlook their present condition and rely more on my memory for some details, but I did my best.

Valentine's Day Cake

2/16. Valentine's Day Cake, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in.

Instead of giving my wife a store-bought cake on Thursday, I made her a small heart-shaped one and let Breagha help sprinkle the red sugar on top (though she was more interested in licking it off her hand). We took a picture of it and on Saturday I thought I'd paint the last piece before it was gone. I quickly came to believe that, despite anything I used to think of Wayne Thiebaud, only he could capture the fake-colored sugar and shortening essence of a cake. (If anyone is wondering, the stuff at the top of my painting was my crude attempt at the plastic wrap.)

Gary Grier show, Charleston

We decided sort of last minute to drive down to Charleston, SC, on Friday to catch the opening reception for my good friend Gary, who is showing alongside printmaker Lou Stovall (read a review here). The drive took much longer than anticipated with the baby, but luckily we made it in time and I got to catch up a little with him and a couple other old schoolmates, Sean and Shane, who each came from out of town as well for the big night. It was so surreal seeing these guys again after almost ten years – we were all noticeably more mature (at least on the outside), yet it felt like we had parted ways only months ago.






As Gary told me, much of the work in the current show was a result of his walks to and from his studio, just outside of Charleston’s elegant and prosperous downtown. With the feel of the pavement beneath his feet day after day came the realization that here were neighborhoods in decline which needed to be preserved or at least documented in paint. I'm always impressed by the sincerity of his paintings, and it was especially awesome to be able to stand in front of a large group of them for the first time. Maybe just experiencing an old friend’s brush marks in person again was inspiring enough, but I got a real kick out of all the rich ochres and neutral browns in his middle shadows, those great Old Master colors that inspired us so much during our days at school. On Saturday the two of us spent a long while in his studio talking about paint and reminiscing about those good old days, and I left on Sunday morning with a sense of renewal.

Overall our experience of downtown Charleston was a brief whirlwind tour, but we had enough time to do some strolling, get all messy at a little crab shack just beyond the fancier establishments on East Bay St., and visit the Gibbes Museum of Art where I surreptitiously photographed a couple of paintings that I found interesting:


- a modern looking Robert Henri; and a portrait by Antonio de la Gandara of the infamous "Madame X," which the unfortunate lady commissioned in the hope of undoing the great scandal caused by Sargent's earlier painting. (See them better on the Web: 1, 2.) The Henri piece was part of a small, eclectic group that included a W.M. Chase portrait remarkable for a sketchy part done in Gary's same browns and ochres; a large and almost garishly loud Childe Hassam; as well as some magnificent Hokusai and Hiroshige prints.

On the drive home through the Carolinas there was an extremely strong wind, and we passed through dust clouds and the smoke of what we later learned were huge brush fires just before the Virginia border, which turned parts of the sky amazing shades of red and purple. It was a fantastic end to a pleasantly surreal weekend.

Little bear slippers

1/28. Little bear slippers, oil on linen panel, 5x7 in.

I've finally gone to a white background! Please "bear" with me as I adjust some other colors and possibly change my banner in the coming days.

We saw these slippers the other day at Target on sale for a couple of bucks, and our daughter loved them immediately. She barely fits in them because of all the puffy stuffing (we might have to perform some surgery on the insides) but that doesn't stop her.

Rubber duck

1/19. Rubber duck, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in. SOLD

This duck is part of a Russ baby bath set that was given to Breagha a while back. I think it's one of the cutest duckies out there, but apart from being able to squirt water out the little mouth hole it functions poorly as a bath toy (being tall and top-heavy).

Old English word of the day:

snáw [snau]: snow.

Here are some shots of Breagha I took late this morning, taking advantage of some rare snowfall. It was already starting to melt by this time but there was still enough to have some fun with. [Every time she sees her duckie on the computer screen she points and goes "quack!" - or something between "kaaa" and "kaaaaack."]

Pair of gloves

1/16. Pair of gloves, oil in linen panel, 5x7 in.

A late Happy New Year greeting to everyone, and a thanks to those who wished me well. We had returned from a lovely visit with family and were getting comfortable at home when my wife and daughter and finally I came down with a bad virus. They had it worse, with fevers and all - Breagha one weekend got her first ever fever, and slept (not too successfully) in bed with for us for several nights. She got better quick, but my wife and I are still fighting monster coughs. It’s really too bad when you have just a virus (i.e. a cold) because your doctor, if he/she’s responsible, won’t have anything to prescribe other than a cough suppressant that doesn’t work. A sore throat is always the most annoying thing to me, and I was real glad when mine went away. I hope everyone out there has been well, or at least suffered only a teeny cold this winter.

Over Christmas I found it hard to get motivated to paint anything, so I didn’t, and consequently I’ve felt that weird burden that comes from detachment. During the couple of weeks at home I could feel myself already getting rusty, but being sick I didn’t have the energy. The longer I went the heavier that inertia felt. It’s a funny thing that invisible force, the hurdle in the mind that grows higher with time and inactivity. What should be another step in the journey slowly becomes a "first" step, as more and more importance is attached to it. But the key is that it really is in the mind, and all of this burden is as quick to vanish as it is slow to appear. (A strange thing is, I always believed, that an extended time away from something can help, as my accumulated years away from painting had helped, in terms of developing strong likes and dislikes and subconscious feelings of what I was ultimately after, and perhaps making it easier to unlearn some things. But of course this is a theory and unprovable.)

My wife got me these real nice gloves for Christmas, which had come in handy in upstate New York but Virginia weather hasn't much called for (last week it was almost summery here). I had never painted leather so this was a new texture and more limited palette (for me). Rusty as I felt, I wasn’t sure how well it would turn out, but it was an easier subject than the pepper shaker so I wasn’t too worried, really. It was nice to paint again; when I finally took my glass palette out of my paint box and slid it onto its place on the easel it felt like a handshake with a good friend.

Old English word of the day:

glóf [glōf]: glove

Tagged!

I’ve been double tagged! (Does it mean I have to do this twice?) Thanks to Alvin Richard and Jason Waskey for allowing me to reveal some odd facts about myself - some of it previously secret! But first, the rules as I've lifted them: 1) Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog. 2) Share 5 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird. 3) Tag 5 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs. 4) Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog. All right, then:

1) I secretly hate to draw. I have never filled a sketchbook in my life. Which means I seriously need to do it more, like maybe at least as often as I’m painting, especially because I wish I were a fraction as good as my ultimate artistic hero (though I don’t mention him much), Edgar Degas.

2) I used to have this fantasy that I’d one day discover Degas was really my great-great-grandfather/-uncle or something.

3) It will be a long time before I can say that I’ve read most of the books I own. Partly because I read horribly slow and partly because, as I always like to be in the process of reading any book, I used to pick up several others while still in the middle of one, only to get stuck in all of them and giving up on the one I’d set out to read in the first place. I still try to have a book going at all times, except nowadays I can get through it before taking on another, and the number of books read is beginning to grow. Not long ago my wife asked me where I’d been finding the time to read, and the answer is: in the bathroom, a few pages at a time. TMI?? (The comedian Jeff Foxworthy said recently about his newest Redneck Dictionary that it would be less likely to sit on a coffee table than on the back of a toilet. Well, in our home it could easily share the porcelain with something by Kafka, Camus, or Chris Hitchens. Sorry, Chris.)

4) I have a desire, perhaps not secret, to learn to play bagpipes - Scottish first, then maybe the Irish – perhaps as a step towards fulfilling the dream of someday, somehow, starting a pseudo-Renaissance-age/pseudo-Celtic/rock band that incorporates period pipes and a shawm and gittern and flute (and maybe a Japanese shakuhachi) and some violas da gamba and such things. Ok, forget that. Band aside, I know I would have to spend years tooting on a practice chanter before even picking up a full set of pipes and, well, it only makes me have more respect for anyone who even tries - I may be wrong but it seems it would be harder to sort of just "get by" on bagpipes than on other instruments.

5) I’m always secretly on the lookout for multiple shadows in movies - I mean, when it’s obvious that an outdoor scene is really a set. A person in sunlight normally would cast a single shadow, yet once in a while you’ll see maybe four or more faint ones. This is common in TV shows, but I began to notice it a while back in a lot of movies too - older ones, especially Westerns (never mind the absence of bullet holes or blood) - and now I can’t stop looking for them. Check it out for yourself!

Now here are some people I’d like to tag:

Paul Schmid
Connie Kleinjans
Paul Keysar
Allison Sommers
Vince Nguyen

Bartlett pear

12/4: Bartlett pear, oil on linen panel, 7x5 in.

I'm still here. I was going to post something about the Paint Out but was too tired after the reception, and on Sunday night had some kind of stomach bug that still had me feeling weak yesterday. (Maybe it was just real bad indigestion, made worse by my ignoring my wife's advice to lay off dairy and other stuff for a while.) Anyway, I haven't been at the computer much and haven't responded to anyone, but thanks to those who wished me luck the other day. I struggled at the Paint Out, as I will write about later, but I'm proud of myself for taking part and it only made me want to do more plein air work. Nevertheless I'm really glad to be back at my chunky easel, and for now there will be more small fruit.

Lately I started making my panels using Yarka extra fine grain linen glued to hardboard with a liquid hide glue, spread with a brush or roller. There are a few more irregularities in the linen than the Old Holland brand I was using at first, and the priming is stiffer. But I love its funky sizing smell, and the feel and look of it being made by hand, like they just sliced a length of it off in their cold Russian workshop and mailed it to you. I don't know how this brand compares to a roll of Claessens, but I read that it was a great value and it really is. So far I haven't had much trouble with the linen being slick - maybe I am working better and am more in tune with the surface.

Gold potato

11/23: Gold potato, oil on linen panel, 5x4 in. SOLD

I'm back from my first somewhat extended blog break. Sorry for leaving abruptly. I hope all my U.S. friends had a great Thanksgiving and were able to get stuffed full of turkey or ham, mashed potato etc., and possibly a syrup-laden cranberry jelly (my wife makes the real thing but we like the canned stuff also). I had had the task of clearing off the mountain range of clutter from the table in the dining room - my "studio" - and I don't know when I would have got it done if the holiday hadn't rolled around. Now I can get started making a fresh mound of clutter.... Yesterday I got up super early and braved the crowd for the first time to hunt down a new vacuum cleaner among other things - I only went to one store so it wasn't too bad, but I wouldn't want to do it again any time soon as I was all messed up the rest of the day.

I also got some Indian yellow yesterday to try for the first time, after seeing too many other painters use it in their standard palettes. Only a tiny bit if any made it into this painting, which maybe shows that I don't really need it, but I've begun to see how having a transparent yellow might be useful.

Work in progress: Hubbard squash

10/27: Hubbard squash, oil on canvas panel, approx. 12x9 in.

(This is not a very good photo.) It's a monochrome setup, and the various blue/green-greys here in the squash were trickier to pin down than I imagined, so there was no way I could finish it in one go. It's a big heavy thing and I'm hoping to capture its weight, but right now it kind of looks like one of those tiny white onions.

* * *

Something I wanted to mention several days ago: We were finally able to get our second car past inspection, owing in large part to Lee who runs the Honda & Acura Expert shop here in town. We'd been putting off some big repairs (big for us anyway) but brought the car to him as we've done in the past, and he was more than fair with us and even finished way sooner than we'd hoped. As always he went beyond our expectations for a repair shop, and I gave him a small painting as a sort of early Christmas present for the honesty he's shown us and for always taking care of us like a friend. I hope a couple of people in the Hampton Roads area may read this and consider taking their own vehicles there for service. So this would have fit under the topic of "grow," as we wish Lee and his family much growth and success in the future.

Sassafras leaf

10/11: Sassafras leaf, oil on canvas panel, 4x5 in.

My daughter loves to examine leaves on the ground. This one I took inside with me because it was in decent shape and the deep red was great. I'd seen this type of leaf a thousand times and not known what tree it comes from, so good thing we have a Trees Fandex Family Field Guide. Big kids would have fun with this book and its die-cut leaf shapes, which make it very easy to match our most common tree species (the annoying thing is that the pages catch on each other).

I wished I could capture all the subtle colors on this leaf, or at least make a translation that conveyed a fraction of the complexity that I saw. But I could go nuts trying to do that, as I felt I might when I went over the same area for the fourth time to get it "right." So, on the other hand, I wish I was able to simplify a leaf (the way I possibly could with a fruit) down to the point that all surface nuances were left totally to the imagination. I guess the idioms I use in translating could be better at times. Here the main challenge was balancing the dusty purple in the center, which I played down, and the seemingly hundreds of hot and cool reds throughout.

Eddoes

10/7: Eddoes, oil on canvas panel, approx. 4x6 in. NFS

We stopped by the Asian American Food Market yesterday (ah, that fishy smell on a hot day) to get some sambal and browse around. I saw these things labeled "eddo," and picked them up not knowing what they were, thinking I'd torture myself later by painting their strange texture. It makes me think of an armadillo (or some ringed bug I might have seen), almost scaly, kind of furry. I played up the warm and cool tones within the browns, hoping not to break up the form too much. This was about two and a half hours.

Eddoes are a small variety of taro root (Colocasia esculenta). Taro, though the word is Polynesian, originated in India or Malaysia(?) - not China as the Creole dasheen ("de Chine") suggests. Its cultivation spread to China, throughout South Asia and eventually Polynesia, and west to the Mediterranean and Africa. Slave traders would later bring it from Africa to the West Indies, and the word "eddo" apparently is derived from one or more West African words. According to harvestwizard.com there are more than 200 varieties of taro, though not all cultivated. It has been cultivated for 7000 years, and is believed to have been harvested in New Guinea 30,000 years ago!

The taro plant is related to a Caladium and likewise may sometimes be called an "elephant ear" because of its large leaves.

Cassell's French Dictionary

9/21: Cassell's French Dictionary, oil on canvas panel, approx. 6x8 in.

We found this at a thrift store for a couple of dollars, and many people I'm sure have a copy at home. This one is from 1962, very outdated. There was something that felt real good about mixing the dark grey-browns and how they look lain over warmer browns ... very old-school. (Click to see "all sizes" - I've started uploading some of these wide pieces slightly bigger.)

Coffee cups

8/30: Coffee cups, oil on canvas panel, approx. 6x8 in.

I always enjoy seeing the frothy pattern along the inside of the cup that my coffee leaves behind, so I thought I'd examine that here. We are spoiled: our daily "coffee" is cappucino made in a 2-in-1 regular-coffee/espresso-and-cappucino machine that we got at Wal-Mart (that also had an open-box discount). It takes more effort than just flipping a switch, but worth it.

I was very shocked this morning to find my little pig buddies were the Illustration Friday pick of the week! Thanks to whoever made that decision, and to everyone who left a comment - if I was confusing before, I painted it with oils (I'm really not good with acrylics). I apologize for having a dead portfolio link for the longest time, but until I get the "real" site redone, the link now goes to the Flickr set where I've put those images.

Also, I want to share an article I just saw about an old friend, Jenga. She's a good person doing a good thing - check it out here. (You can read more in her blog "The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round," which is in my links list.)