At home, recipes are recipes, but the second piece is installed as a fragment to draw attention to the page, not just the sentimentality of “grandma’s recipe” and what’s written on the page.


In between the recipes I painted images directly on the walls from the recipe pages, in particular the women’s names who are credited for recipes, so often anonymous and overlooked, here writ large and with some of the page details.


I was careful to cut out the details of things like the threads of the binding coming unraveled, to call attention to the details of the visual image.


They’re tiny on purpose as these are things often overlooked, constrained to the domestic world and not often considered apart from their use. I liked that you could miss them, and then when you saw them, they were fun to find, like following clues.


This one is on a door leading to an outdoor corridor . . .


Once you see them, they lead you along . . .


A few are blank pages to call attention to the visual language of the page - the underlying grid, the color of the aging paper, and the emotional response you have. For me it’s possibility in the blank page . . . the emptiness of ancestors gone . . .


They were placed outside and inside elevators . . . a quote from my statement: “The handwritten recipe page imparts meaning through implied or actual experience and process, echoes life’s impermanence, measures and maps a personal history over time that enriches a sense of identity, evolves through experimentation and changes in taste and availability of materials and produces a visceral connection to ancestors perhaps long gone.”


This one is one of my favorites. It’s for devil’s food and I hung it on the soda machine but it was a subconscious decision. My instructor pointed out the irony.


Wonderful contrast of aging pop machine and aging old recipe . . .


Once we get to the building with the art studios in it, I start to draw out the visual language of the recipes because now that we have left home and gone to the studio, the recipe is not just a recipe but becomes what I make from it. People stole them regularly. They are beautiful . . and the stealing became part of the piece - how the recipes were coveted and went out into the community . . .


Once in the art building the focus changed. Now the wall paintings draw imagery from the pages but call attention to the visual language more and more. They evolve as art evolves.


Once inside the actual art studios, I started pulling drawing elements from the page, like this script “p” so evocative, and the negative space of the rectangle that references the recipe page without showing it. This is about four feet high.


Here’s my last wall drawing, trying to evoke the old recipe without copying it . . .


This is a detail shot of the wall drawing. And a quote from “Reading the Language of Objects”: “Compressed inside its small material self, the genie of meaning, captured by the artist, is released by a viewer who willingly participates in the mysteries of making.” Coming soon: new paintings and a baking performance piece!

Oh she liked the tile okay. It was the objects that concerned her. I explained to her why I love painting food, how I think of food as symbol and metaphor as much as sustenance, how I love the association with domesticity and work that is repetitive and a ritual of daily life. How I want to say something about how food connects us to our past and brings people together. “Why don’t you pour something onto the tile?” she suggested, “Like soda.” “Olive oil?” I asked. “Fine,” she replied. So oil it was.


As a painter, it was interesting to think of the tile in a more conceptual way but as a cook, it wasn’t.


Finally, I chose a cooking image to sketch in oils instead. I also brought my little potted herb garden with me and plucked some herbs to chop for my lunch. This one is not on the tile but more are coming with the tile included. On the day of my first critique, my professor told me that I had a productive week and told me to revisit the work of a favorite artist of mine. In the pages of an enormous book about this artist from the university library I found clues to what I am after if only I can master it. Stay tuned!

We had also done a photo shoot in Laura’s kitchen previously that yielded this image. I painted it from the photo. We both agreed that we liked the image, but it wasn’t exactly what we wanted for Jellypress. For me, the immediacy of working from life was missing. The camera decides so much for you. I wanted to experience the image I would paint without the camera lens distancing me from it.

In the same painting, over to the right, I painted a bowl of cooked strawberries. There was also a photo with the same feeling. Despite myself, the loss was coloring everything I did. Laura and I joked that we would name the image “The Strawberries of Doom.” Even though we were kidding, we knew there was some truth in it too. Life is not always pretty or fair and we are both nourished and starved as we live and learn. In the beauty of ripe strawberries, there always exists the mud they come from, the garbage of the compost that fed them, the rot that will overtake them in time as they in turn become nourishment for new growth. I wanted all that in the painting.

Finally, alone in my kitchen, I painted this image from life. I worked without over-thinking it. Just a simple image, I thought. Fruit, cutting board, the knife left for a moment by the unseen cook. It was only later, when people mentioned the knife’s edge, so prominent in the foreground, that I realized how much of us comes out in our art without our conscious control. It’s all there. 

Next I tried a different canister in pastel, but I knew right away that the freshness of the pastel medium was not right for the old feeling of these dinged-up cans.

I did another pastel with more going on in the composition than just the cans. I liked the quality of the light, but I still felt that pastel was not right for this image.

In the end this painting with the more subtle qualities of oil paint captured the canisters best. 

On a brown cutting board their color really glowed, and I liked the intensely blue shadows but the background color was competing with them.

I liked them better against the neutral color and grid of my tiled kitchen counter, but watercolor still wasn't getting everything I loved about them.

It took my pastel chalks to really catch the way the light hits them. Now I long to see them in oil paint . . height="312" />