It is Thursday and, happily, I have no classes today which is not the same thing as having no class today.  On the heels of a wonderful little winter storm I am noticing that the sky is a clean-scrubbed blue up above the clouds.  I asked my painting professor just what formula  I would have to mix in order to replicate its depth and intensity.

These are the things that launch one-hour conversations among painters and get us completely distracted from otherwise productive lives.  When you steep yourself in the bubbling cauldron of creativity you discover not only how strong you are, like Eleanor Roosevelt's proverbial tea bag, you also discover the severe limitations that come with having to live within the parameters of conventional time.  Suddenly, 24 hours per day become 12, or even 8.  Weeks contain 3 or 4 days:  the ones spent not painting or planning to paint or dreaming of painting or buying new paint or discussing paint are just somehow not in the week.
They have escaped to a world of other pursuits, the unreal plane populated by all things non-painting.

Even when not painting I live in a color theory and composition world.  I notice that I make plates for my breakfasts, lunches, and dinners resemble faces or landscapes by different artists.  Today's was an essay into the non-objective and begs the question "What would happen if a portrait-on-a-plate had no recognizable features but used only color, line and form?"  This is the kind of question that has landed artists in loony bins for years.  It was also Wasily Kandinsky playing in my head.

I'm not sure how many hours I've been working.  The clock indicates I've been here just under 25 minutes, but it also seems that the creative breakthroughs are always the work of hours and days and weeks and yes, even years of dreaming and exploring.  So over a plate of scrambled eggs and mushrooms a new relativity has become manifest.  It must mean it's time to quit doing non-painting things and do what's important.

But lest we think that time spent in the world of imagining is time misspent, remember this:

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.  Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."   -Gloria Marie Steinem

And, for those who are curious:  a sky like today's begins life on canvas with pthalo blue and cobalt, or maybe 2 parts cobalt, 8 parts titanium white, and 1/2 part cadmium yellow light.  Happy painting!

Study in Mushrooms: Watercolor

I don't know which is more fun-cooking the mushrooms, eating them, or painting them! This dish was from over the weekend (see older posts) but I did the painting last night. I am enjoying the immediacy of watercolors again and had a lot of fun blending the colors for the cast iron skillet.

Have you ever noticed that black is never really black? There is a multitude of shadings all along the color spectrum from indigo blue to a russety deep brown and of course various saturations of color to take advantage of the white of the paper. One thing about working with whites-in a watercolor, they make the painted areas around them really "pop" so it's critical to save a great deal of the white wherever you want sparkle and movement.

Speaking of movement, I had fun washing in the background color in a concentric circle around the shape of the pan. Our stovetop is a shiny black glass which bounces a lot of light around, so getting (again) the sense of light and the fun colors from the reflective surface made it an interesting piece to do.

Shortcut to Mushrooms!

Spring vegetables are so easy to prepare in California, it's practically obscene to call it cooking. Asparagus come in so sweet and tender to the local markets, all you have to do is rinse them off.

I remember as a young woman first learning to cook in my very own kitchen, having to ask a coworker how to prepare asparagus. We'd never had them in my family of origin. I don't know if that's because they were among those "exotic" vegetables that my Michigan- and Ohio-born parents never ate, or if they were among the long list of fibrous foods that irritated my father's stomach ulcer. At any rate, my coworker's instructions included a burdensome amount of scraping, paring, and scrubbing. They then had to be steamed, feet down, in a tall basket within a tall pot, with their toes in 1" (precisely) of boiling water.

Happily, I have learned better since. To do our asparagus now, Dan and I often simply break the toe-end of the stalks off where they naturally "snap", rinse them well in cold water, and toss them into a skillet of simmering water for about 5 minutes then rescue them, shake off the excess moisture, and plate them with butter. If they're large and tough, Dan peels them about the ankles but I just snap them off higher up. Nothing is wasted anyway, since we compost everything.

Mushrooms are even easier since I learned this trick: Don't wash them when you bring them home. Instead, keep them loosely wrapped in the crisper drawer and when ready to cook, take them in the plastic bag, fill it with enough water to cover the 'shrooms, twist the top tightly and shake the bag vigorously for a few seconds. Dump them out into a strainer or colander and rinse quickly with cold water. Spin them in a salad spinner if you have one, or blot them with paper towels if you don't. Slice them into 1/4" slices and put them immediately into a hot (360) skillet with 1-2 T. melted butter and about 1 tsp. olive oil. Keep them moving but do not stir because this will bruise them! If you want a really savory treat, add a bare splash of Worcestershire sauce about 30 seconds before taking them off the stove. They're great with red meat when prepared this way.

Incidentally, that was one recipe my mother did teach me to make, although I was an adult before I liked them!

Dan grilled these steaks out on the patio to make our Saturday dinner perfect. Is it any wonder I'm crazy about weekends?