Permanence and Transience: Cooking vs. Art

My mother is an excellent cook. She can make just about anything from Moroccan tagine to traditional pot roast. And she can cook for the masses, catering my entire wedding, my cousin's wedding and both mine and my sis's Bat Mitzvahs. Absolutely none of this talent was passed on to me. Or maybe it was but never fully realized as I hate to cook.

I like the idea of pleasing my friends, exacting their love and admiration through gastronomy; but I loathe the notion of spending time creating these pleasures. Food is temporary. Hours spent, adding a pinch of this, a spoonful of that, seem wasted on transience.

Please do not get me wrong. I love cooks. I love food. I love home cooking. I am fortunate to reap the benefits of those whose creativity is ignited by food, whom are impassioned by the combination of spices, the grouping of flavors.

My art, however, is born out of a yearning for permanence. I screen print my images so they will last for centuries to come rather than using a computer to lifelessly copy my work. I hand-paint my cards so they are kept; records of a time and place serving as personal histories. The notion that what I create may last lifetimes excites me and serves to motivate.

But a good meal is remembered. I will never forget the calamari in Turkey or the steak in Belgium or my mother's homemade grapeleaves. And that recollection I pass on to others, as I do now. Thus cooking is not momentary, rather the memory intangible.

Thus I present Bouillon Kub (my homage, painted in gouache on wood, to the original bouillon cube packaging in France circa 1920 and, from what I understand, still used today) to all the amazing cooks out there. May your food be forever remembered.

Sleeping by the Fishes

My father loves fish. One day, when I was little, he decided he wanted a fish pond. Telling my mother of his vision of a backyard oasis replete with two fish ponds brimming with enormous Japanese koi, she quickly dismissed this notion as a passing fancy; another one of his ridiculous, destructive decorating schemes.

He waited until she was at work, borrowed a jack hammer and went to town on our backyard. Twenty years later there are indeed two fish ponds in their backyard (I have long since moved) brimming with small to medium-sized koi, a fountain and two benches; his dream fully realized.

I painted "I Pesci" in honor of my father. A tribute to the fish for a man obsessed.

Walt Whitman & Portland

Whilst strolling about southeast Portland in the seemingly perpetual February drizzle, I spied what is perhaps one of my greatest sources of neighborhood inspiration: a hand-painted sign situated along a streetpole on a fairly major thoroughfare in the beautiful "Rose City" inconspicuously boasting the words of the first great American populist poet, Walt Whitman. His Leaves of Grass is perhaps the greatest collection of poetry of the nineteenth century and "Song of Myself" my most favorite of all.

Everyday I walk my dog Belle, a Mastiff-Lab cross, by the Walt Whitman streetpole (I find this wonderfully apropos as Whitman was a true man of the street, a poet of the senses). Regardless of my present mood, a rather hedonistic creative spirit wells up. My regard for Portland increases despite the present gloominess and my faith in art, culture, society and civilization is happily restored. The power of poetry is quite mighty indeed.

The painting pictured was inspired by my vision of a loud, dark and dirty Victorian era tavern in Whitman's industrial haven of New York City.

Fin de siècle

Fin de siècle France is perhaps my greatest inspiration. The lines between commercial art and fine art were distinctly blurred as the industrial economy grew and advertising, executed manually, supported fine artists directly.




















Out of the marriage between commercial art and fine art, handmade and manufactured was born Art Nouveau. The French lead the way.

I love the streamlined organic form and limited color palette of the Art Nouveau movement in France.

This is one of the more spectacular examples of Art Nouveau furniture and is one of my many muses from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

The painting above is one of my latest. The painting derives its inspiration primarily from the French Art Nouveau movement.