Last Cookbook Images, Really

Two last cookbook images. There was a request for another Europe, because, as it turned out, there were no French recipes in the cookbook (a rather minor objection, I thought). The new illustration was designed to represent more of a central and eastern European feel.

There was also a request to move North America out of the urban landscape and into the heartland. I kept basically the same people and their arrangement, but changed the background and the type of food on the table. Better or worse?

both Illustrations Faber-Castell Pens on Paper

International Foods & Etc.

Here is a wonderful facet of America, and especially the DC area: the wealth of international recipes and culinary traditions that have floated to our shores along with our poor, tired, and hungry huddled masses.

These illustrations were inspired by the international vegetarian food fair put on by the members of the Capitol Memorial Church in DC. The members hail from all over the world, and so they hold an annual food fair for the community, where everyone can come and sample as much as they can eat. This year they are also putting out a much-anticipated cookbook.

Each drawing loosely illustrates one of five rather wide geographical regions represented.

First, Latin America, and where would we be without tortillas and tamales and cherimoyas and flan?

The Caribbean is another near neighbor, so it makes sense that Caribbean food would influence our diet. As the crossroads of the world, Caribbean traditions have also been impacted in turn by African, Indian, Spanish and American influences, to name a few. But when I drew this, I was mostly thinking about islands, music, and pina coladas.

Europe and North America were lumped together into a single region, so I envisioned European immigrants meeting in the great melting pot of New York to share a food that has probably been called both European and American: Pizza.

A lot of American food, especially in rural areas, hails from Europe. I used to work in a retirement home in rural Pennsylvania where most of the residents claimed German/Ukranian/Hungarian heritage. There the four main food groups were potatoes, tomatoes, meat, and sauerkraut.

Asia includes a number of different countries and cultures, but I just focused on India and South Korea in this drawing, attempting to describe South Korea in careful and aesthetic rectangles, and India in overflowing circles of all sizes.

I love Indian food. I want some right now.

Africa is another wide region. But I focused on the part of Africa I am familiar with, West Africa, and especially West African street food. Here a student is buying red-red (fried plantains with red beans). Red-red exemplifies what I love about African street food. There are the basic ingredients, plantains and beans, and then all of these other little things you can add, or not, depending on your taste: palm oil, hot pepper, and garri (dried, grated cassava), at no extra charge.

Now I'm really really hungry.

All illustrations are in markers on white paper

(Faber-Castell pens, actually. I am a huge, huge fan of these for drawing)

Work in Progress

Graphite on Paper

Some sketches that are part of a book dummy I've been working on. The final illustrations would be rendered in ink and oil paint with other textural elements.

Here our young hero climbs into a cave. What will he find there? What possible attraction could have lured him from his home into this little hole in the ground?

Probably rocks.

Graphite on Paper

Our successful hero struggles back onto his horse for the long journey home. Aww, such a plucky little guy. Now I like him.

Orchids

Ink on Paper

Orchids at the National Botanical Gardens in DC. I love wandering around the gardens on a hot day in the capitol. Trying to draw flowers without using color is also interesting.

I don't know if I was nearly as successful as ancient Chinese artists, who made peacocks iridescent and peaches pink without any colored pigments at all. This way they came closer to understanding an object's true nature, according to Victoria Finlay in her book, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002, Ballantine). I was looking for a book on color theory and found this one instead at the library. It isn't really about color theory, but more of a history of color, and I highly recommend it.

Colors were for professional painters--who were rather sneered upon by the elite, as creating something necessary but vulgar. Black, on the other hand, was for the gentleman artists, who combined the skills of poetry and painting, and who wanted to portray the landscape of the mind, not of the eye. (p. 91, on the history of the color black during the Tang dynasty)

She goes on to relate a story about Su Dongpo, a scholar-artist living in the eleventh century (p. 92).

Once...Su was criticized for painting a picture of a leafy bamboo using red ink. Not realistic, his critics said gleefully. "Then what color should I have used?" he asked. "Black, of course," came the answer.

One last interesting bit on the history of ink:

From early times both the Persians and the Chinese thought it was desirable to have ink that not only travelled seductively across the paper, but which also smelled wonderful. So they would add perfumes, to make writing the sensual experience that scholars deserved. Sometimes recipes for ink read like the random elements of a love poem: cloves, honey, locusts, the virgin pressing of olives, powdered pearl, scented musk, rhinoceros horn, jade, jasper, as well as, of course--most poignant and most common--that exquisite smoke of pine trees in autumn.
(p. 92)

Portraits

My favorite little neighbor. She reigned like a little queen over a neighborhood gang of boys, and stopped by often to ask to play with a highlighter, or colored clay, or to drink my water, which she seemed to think was different from her own water at home. I got her to sit still for a little while and made this quick sketch of her, shortly after she began first grade.

Then she drew me. Very promising, I think. I like how she got my glasses, and my sandals.

Markers and Gel Pens on Paper

Child

Another moment. I was sitting in a market, bored, waiting to meet someone. The market was full of men who watched me curiously, and so, as a strategy to avoid conversation, I sat on a stool by a woman's sewing shop and began this drawing of a young girl who was sitting nearby. Called to my appointment, I never finished. This person, who I met, would change my life, but of course I didn't know that then, trying to capture the girl's face quickly before some older sister called her off on an errand. And then someone did call her, and someone called me.

So here is the unfinished face of a child whom I never met before or after. And here is the moment before everything changed.

Ink on Paper

From Ghana with Love

A sketch is a moment in time captured on paper. These drawings were made during long quiet days in Ghana, where I lived and worked for two years, and where I learned a lot about how to relax and appreciate the day. The drawing above captures a sudden rainstorm seen through a tear in the patchwork curtains over a barred window.

Below, another expat friend, inside her bungalow, sitting and talking late into a warm evening while her dog sleeps on another chair.
Her dog, Jaro.

Ink, Markers and Gel Pens on Paper

Nyepa

My Nyepa. Endlessly patient, posing yet again, although I think he was tired and would have preferred to take a nap.

Ink on Recycled Paper

Life Drawing Class

I attended a life drawing class that was open to the community. I haven't drawn in a session using a model since school, and I forgot what it was like: intense concentration as the model shifts through one, two and five-minute poses. After a half hour of those, a ten-minute pose seems excruciatingly long. It’s hard work, representing a proportional figure in charcoal, ink, oil pastel on colored paper, over and over for hours. I forgot about the cohesive sort of camaraderie that develops between students, teacher, and model, by the second or third hour. During breaks, we chat, as the model munches carrot sticks. By the end it’s much more intuitive, and I’m exhausted, the drawing coming faster and easier and more complete.

Ink on Recycled Paper