Dogwood...

Dogwood...

A culinary interlude...

 

We go out to lunch ~ inevitably I will play with my food. I know, terrible table-manners but in my defense: this is a classic, urban, blue-collar saloon where the white-haired Irish bartender has a delightful brogue & the air is redolent with the rich, yeasty, unapologetically butch aroma of stale beer. (Not unpleasant, in fact the way an old-school bar is supposed to smell.) Since it caters to mostly college kids, lawyers, firemen & policemen, I didn't feel that a moment of surrealistic, slapstick humour was grossly inappropriate. The Hawaiian shirt may have also been a contributing factor ~ one can never be sure of these things... Anyway, I was brought up to share so here is your morsel of gastronomic Dada: The Cheese Veil.

I'm convinced Man Ray, Meret Oppenheimer & even Marcel Duchamp would approve.

Image courtesy of Seth the Cheese Monster's iPhone.

Cherry Bombs, 2008

Rick, 2008

Here, then gone...

Vanitas Still Life, 2008

Dogwood...

Dog-tooth violet...

The name comes from the bulb, which is shaped almost exactly like a dog's tooth. Not a true viola but, in fact, a member of the lily family. (Hence it's other common name: Trout Lily.)

I've never noticed it before but they have a faint, sweet, yet quite distinctive fragrance.

Seth, 2008

Stephen, 2008

Tracy, 2008

L'heure bleue...

Actually about fifteen minutes before.

The next wave...

This is a species tulip; a wild thing. I can't remember it's botanical name but in my Book of Days these are the second important arrivals of Spring. (My little wayward crocuses being the first. There will be pictures of the third when it happens. Be patient; it's a good one.) These native tulips are smaller & earlier to bloom than the modern hybrids like the Darwin varieties, but come back every year without fail. If you have any familiarity with Persian or Indian Mughal miniature paintings, the form of the flower should be quite familiar. Tulips originally came from the steppes, those temperate, high grasslands of central Asia & have been a favored decorative motif there for centuries; long before the Dutch appropriated them. The name is a derivative (as is the word turban, which tulips were thought to resemble) of the Turkish word tulbend ~ literally, a type of muslin gauze. Not too hard to see why looking at this portrait of a turbaned Ottoman Turk. The Persians called them lale or laleh. (Humm... This now makes me wonder if the word lollipop might also be derived from the Persian word for tulip ~ a blob of colorful candy at the top of an upright stick... I'll have to check into that one.) In the sixteenth century the first bulbs were reportedly brought back to the Netherlands from the court of Suleiman the Magnificent (who is, in fact, that outrageously turbaned Ottoman Turk to your left) by a Dutch ambassador who also happened to be an avid horticulturalist. Once in Europe tulbend was changed into tulipe (by the French, of course) & then tulip. The next step was the Tulipomania of 1637, but I'm not going there again ~ I'll let Wikipedia do it for me.

This is completely unrelated, but today is Buddha's official birthday.

O-hanami...

Japanese Study (Cherry Blossoms), 1996. Acrylic on paper

Untitled watercolor, 2003

Untitled watercolor, 2003

Boudoir...

Done at the same time as the previous watercolor; it has a totally different look. I didn't notice at the time but the colors ultimately ended up looking rather cosmetic-like (considering I was looking for heightened skin tones that's really not too surprising) or like that odd peachy-pink lingerie that was so popular in the 1930's. In fact, the painting ended up pretty damn girlie ~ it easily could have been painted with blush, lip gloss & a few generous swipes of mascara. Completely unintentional. Somehow I unconsciously moved from the sleazy porn of the 1970's to the mirrored vanity table of a 1930's Moderne boudoir. Apparently I'm more in touch with my feminine side than I thought. By the way, the word boudoir literally means "sulking place" in French.

Untitled Watercolor, 2004

Flesh...

Thats right, flesh ~ the lurid, warm, slightly murky, tangerine-hued skin of late 70's VHS porn to be exact. I love the color of skin in low budget & pornographic movies from that time period. Was it Kodachrome that gave flesh that over-heated glow or just bad lighting? Did it have something to do with the transfer process from film to video tape? Maybe it just came down to all that friction... I know there were also cooler film stocks around at the time ~ Ektachrome, I think, but they tended to make the actors look tired & unwell. (In hindsight, maybe it wasn't just the film...) Did cameramen in the porn industry even think about that sort of thing back before it became mainstream? No matter. All I wanted to do was a series of flesh inspired pieces & adult films just happened to have more tangled limbs in extreme close-ups ( not to mention that cheesy color), so it made the best source material. I did a few watercolors as sort of memos to remind me about it later. This is one of them.

Untitled Watercolor, 2004