Eggs with Tomatoes: Beid Franji

Last night I made a dish from my childhood, always a comforting favorite, Beid Franji. It is a simple recipe of eggs poached in tomatoes, which my mother always served over egg noodles. This recipe will make four servings, or fewer if you're feeling extra hungry.

one large onion, sliced
one green pepper, sliced
3 Tbs olive oil
2 cups coarsely chopped tomatoes, with their juice
4 eggs
salt and pepper

1. Place oil and onion in a skillet; cook at high medium heat till onions begin to turn golden.
2. Add peppers and cook onion/pepper mix till they begin to brown.
3. Add tomatoes and juice. Cook for about 10 or 15 minutes, till tomatoes are softened and juice is somewhat reduced. Add salt and pepper to taste.
   
4. Crack eggs into the tomatoes and poach till set to your preference. You can also scramble the eggs into the tomatoes.
   
5. Serve hot over noodles, or any other base you prefer, or with bread.

Working on Black V

I've been working on refining the drawing in this painting, getting the parts in the right place and at the correct proportion. I've also laid down several layers of blue paint, building a solid base for later glazes and scumbles of color. The blue pigment that is the primary color in this work is Manganese Blue, and is quite translucent; because of this quality, I mix the manganese with white to make it more opaque. I can later glaze a darker blue on top of the opaque layers. I've also used Ultramarine Blue, which is a more purple color, for the shadow edges and the darks in the lower part of the painting. As you can see in the details below, the brushwork is still quite loose and open; it will be refined as the work progresses.

A main challenge in this painting is getting the sense of a curved volume of blue; the shape is a cylinder, the curve pointed out by the line at the left of the panel and the movement of the black shapes. The value and color change in the blue should also enhance the illusion of a curved form, which I have to keep in mind as I work. I always enjoy this bit of struggle, of tussle with material and with form, during the process of painting.

A Walk in the Woods: Snow

This morning was a first chance of the season to get out into snowy woods; because it was so mild and the snow was wet, snowshoes were my means of conveyance. The world outside has been reduced to a subtle rendering of line against white, of simple form in limited color. On my way to the woodland path, I passed the naked raspberry canes, a reddish brown against a milky haze.




The trees, of greenish browns, gray browns, warm browns, or tarnished silver, are spotted with lichens and mosses, adding a bit of pattern to their stark volumes.




There are weeds and grasses whose graceful lines we're now able to see, drawn on the snow.




I was able to find a wonderful grouping of mosses and lichens (and is the red possibly a liverwort?) on the north side of a tree, looking like an abstract painting using close and compatible hues, and bright green for sparkling emphasis.




Surprisingly, there are still green ferns popping up here and there; here they provide a counterpoint to the bright blue plastic hose, used to carry maple sap in spring. The barbed wire is from old fencing; it's hard to imagine that the crowded woods may have been pasture years ago. There is nature and manufacture and history, different yet connected, telling their stories in the woods around us.

At the Met: the Greek and Roman Study Collection

Roman Blown Glass, 3rd-4th century AD


I came home this afternoon to a snow covered landscape, very different from the green Vermont in Bing Crosby's White Christmas. I feel as though I have sugar plum fairies dancing in my head, from the loveliness of the views outside my windows, and from the vivid pictures in my mind of things I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday.

When I was last at the Met, I happened to use an unnoticed stairway; on a landing it opened into a small treasure house of artifacts, arrayed in glass cases. There were no labels; you found information about each piece from touch screens placed around the room. In my current mood of being thrilled by objects, I determined to take my camera to the museum the next time I visited. This is the first time I photographed at the museum, and I was surprised how much available light there was. I was also excited by the prospect of capturing images of things that I loved and sharing them; some are objects I've loved for years, such as Chinese vases and Egyptian objects (posts on these are to come); others, like the works in this study collection, are new to me.



Greek Terracotta Skyphos (deep drinking cup), 500 BC


I hadn't seen any Greek painted pottery with such an amusing motif as these guinea fowl; their plump figures pecking around the cup reminded me of wild turkeys. By photographing this piece, I'm able to possess it in an abstract way, understanding it more and keeping it in memory for joyous retrieval. As I wandered through the museum, I was acting on my object-love with my camera. When I've traveled in past years, I only photographed images I could use for my painting, but now I find that gathering images is a enterprise that sharpens my attention and deepens my enjoyment.



Greek and Roman transport amphorae, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD

Happy Hanukkah

Tomorrow is the first night of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, which commemorates a miracle during the rededication of the ancient Temple. I'm heading into NYC today so that I can join my family in our annual Hanukkah party. I'll be away for a few days, seeing family, friends, and art, and will be back early next week, ready to share some of the art I've seen.

A Walk in the Woods: Human Trace, a Sugar House

In recent weeks I've taken a few series of photographs that I haven't had a chance to post. I hope you don't mind that I'm presenting these images when the site is now covered with snow.

At a turn in the path through the woods is a small wooden structure, collapsing more each year, becoming each year more a part of the landscape. I believe it was a sugar house, a shed used to boil maple sap in the spring, distilling it into syrup. When I looked closely at the building, I was struck by the beauty of the sheet metal, aged into a rich palette of naturalistic colors.

These photographs, in their simple abstraction, reminded me of the work of many of the photographers associated with the Institute of Design in Chicago, a school established in 1937 by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus. I admire the work of Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Arthur Siegel and others associated with the school. They helped move photography into the stream of modernism, and away from documentary and journalism. I hope to write a post on this group of artists in the near future, since their work was a strong influence on my photographic work.

The First Winter Storm

The town plow just came up my road, now that today's storm has abated. A predicted snow total of 4 to 8 inches seems to have ended on the low side of that amount. I live on a windy hill, a hard place for accurate measure; the wind is still blowing wildly, and snow is flying. At times today, the world became a minimalist landscape, with accents of brown and black showing through a white blur.

Beginning a New Painting: Black V/The Vertical Painting

I've started work on a new painting, one that goes back to intense color. There are so many different hues of blue; this one is a cool blue, made using manganese pigment. Cerulean blue would work as well, though manganese is more intense. Would you call this sky-blue? looking at this image made me think of the different colors of skies that I saw when painting landscape. On a bright day, the sky here in Vermont tends to be cobalt blue, and has some cooler cerulean as it fades towards the horizon; in the south of France, and in California, I saw skies that were ultramarine, a very warm blue. I remember one summer years ago seeing a yellow tinge in the sky, which came from smoke from forest fires out west.

But the color in this painting is from an object, and is influenced by the direct light of the sun, changing from highlight to cast shadow to half-light. The blue does seem to have a sense of depth to it, like looking into the water of a clear Caribbean sea. It is aggressively held back by the black shapes of strap and pipe.






Above is the painting with the first layers of paint added. I'd mentioned in the previous post that this painting and the new ruglet, Swing, have the same dimensions, 20 x 10 inches. If you look at this composition and the sketch for Swing, or for that matter at Cascading Squares, which is also 20 x 10 inches, you can see how starting with the same format can yield very different results. I love the challenge of using a certain shape and size and creating many moods with shape, color, and line. In painting, I've done numerous 12 inch square paintings, which you can see here , and 12 x 10 inch ruglets, here. (please click images to see them better) It's so much fun to surprise myself with new ideas in the same format.

As you've seen, I've been very interested in using long rectangles, in which the proportions are a least 2 to 1. This is the first painting for which the rectangle is a vertical. (I don't count paintings such as Red Cone or Yellow Curve because their shape is more conventional.) As far as I know, there is very little in western painting history that uses a long vertical shape. I know of a contemporary painter, David Reed, who has worked with this format, though his horizontals are more successful. Within a long horizontal image we can "read" a story; it seems natural for our eye to travel across the surface. Looking from top to bottom is somehow more difficult, and it's harder to make a composition that holds together.

To find masters of this format, we have to look to Asia, where hanging scrolls have, over centuries, beautifully utilized this tall shape.


A Korean landscape in the style of An Kyon, Evening Bell from Mist-Shrouded Temple", 15th century, ink on silk, 35 x 18 inches


The landscape goes from foreground to distance as it moves up the scroll. In this way, our eye curves up around land forms, through the mist, traveling farther and higher into space.


Bada Shanren (1626-1705), Fish and Rocks, ink on paper, 53 x 24 inches


This painting creates a drama between two rocky shapes, heightening visual tensions across an undefined space, which becomes charged with feeling; the tiny flicks of fish float in an emptiness that becomes sea.

A New Rug Hooking Project: Swing

I seem to be a lot of titles recently describing an action: Circling, Lean, Floating, Tilted, Cascading, and now Swing. I could also title this Pink Moon, but there's something about inferring motion that adds to the composition; I seem to be thinking of motion when I'm sketching. This will be a 20 x 10 inch work, going back to the long rectangular format which has fascinated me. I've just begun a painting with the same dimensions, which I'll post tomorrow.





Before doing the sketch above, I rummaged through my dyed swatches, as I often do for color inspiration. I don't often use pale colors in my work––there was Pale Pair and Floating Squares––so thought it would be interesting to do so with this piece. The swatches gave me the color ideas for the sketch. The dyed wool for the project is below, the two lower colors will be the shapes, and the upper ones the background.

Light Tube

Light Tube, 2009, egg tempera on panel, 12 x 12 inches


When I began this painting, I thought it wouldn't be very appealing because of its limited color range, but it seems that its forms are very evocative and compelling to some readers; thank you for that. I like the strong dark shapes against the lighter ones, which move the eye from the sturdy posts on the lower left to the upper right black square. And then there are those entwining "limbs". This work plays with flat shape and volume, with the volume of the rusted pipe sitting on the edge of the painting, pushing against the picture plane.




In the detail above, you can perhaps see an odd visual quirk, that reminded me of Cezanne's paintings, where a line showing the edge of a table hops up or down as it goes behind an object. As the rusted pipe passes in back of the white tube, its edges seem to move, to not be aligned above and below. As I was working on this, I kept checking the outlines with a t-square, and they kept being straight even though they didn't look it.




I'd like to talk a bit about the painting of the black square. You can see the loose brushmarks in siena and ochre depicting rust on the surface. I liked the way the transparent strokes flowed freely one on top of another. Even though this texture doesn't follow my usual rule of sitting flatly on the surface of the image, I left it as it was; I enjoyed the lively touch and wanted a reminder of the possibilities of mark making.

A Winter Day

Yesterday afternoon, it began to snow lightly, and this continued into night. When I woke this morning, it was to a landscape that finally looked like winter, after weeks of mild weather. The last time we had some snow was in mid October, with leaves still on trees. I posted photos of it here. This current snowfall wasn't much, just an inch or two, but it looks very pretty spread across fields and trees and it changes the light completely, with reflected light bouncing off the bright surface. I noticed I had to open up the aperture in the camera because the bright snow was making the camera overcompensate and make too dark an image.





I love the way the light snow festoons branches and weeds, emphasizing their darker lines and shapes. The snow is still flurrying down; if the wind picks up, it will be blown from the fragile hold on limbs and branches and the light/dark lines in space will return to simply dark.

Lean

Lean, 2009, hand-dyed wool on linen, 12 x 12 inches


I've been spending the afternoon dyeing wool for a new ruglet, since I finished Lean a couple of days ago. I enjoy its color, the reds against lime green; the structure makes a nod towards sculpture, with the tall rectangle, rising above the rest of the work, giving an illusion of solidity. I chose to have the green form end in points, like a double-ended rowboat, instead of making it an oval. I like the way the sharp ends are anchored on the edges, creating an exclamation, rather than a sigh.

A Walk in the Woods: Fruiting Bodies

Since I first heard the term "fruiting body" I wanted to write a post with that title. What a wonderfully evocative phrase, making us think of fecund nature: of a cornucopia of ripe fruit, of a pregnant animal, human or other. What it means is a structure in a plant or fungus that contains spores for reproduction. So, mushrooms are fruiting bodies, as are the tiny red caps of the lichen named British Soldier (remember the Redcoats of the Revolutionary War?). The world is full of interesting life, usually beyond notice; it's a gift when we pay attention.

From Painting to Hooked Rug: Kazimir Malevich

Plane in Rotation, Called Black Circle, 1915, oil on canvas, 31 1/8 x 31 1/8 inches



Suprematist Painting: Black Rectangle, Blue Triangle, 1915, oil on canvas, 22 1/2 x 26 1/8
inches


During the years 1915-18, Kazimir Malevich painted remarkably radical paintings, that pared down the elements of art into pure geometry. There were other painters working with non-objective painting at this time––Mondrian and Kandinsky––but they hadn't taken their work this far. Malevich's was a philosophical art, which he called Suprematism, and described as "that end and beginning where sensations are uncovered, where art emerges 'as such' ". The "as such" brings us painting that confronts us with its fact, without referring to a reality beyond paint, shape, and color.



Suprematism (Self Portrait in Two Dimensions), 1915, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 24 3/8 inches



Suprematist Compostion: White on White, 1918, oil on canvas, 31 1/8 x 31 1/8 inches


I remember being thrilled by Malevich's Suprematist paintings when I saw them years ago in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (the photos of the works above were taken from a catalog of a show at the Guggenheim which I didn't get to see; the catalog, Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, is terrific.) The thing that most surprised me was their surface: they are not cold thin works; the artist's hand is very much alive in them. We feel an intellectual clarity along with a sure aesthetic sense in these fairly small paintings. It's interesting to look at them alongside the Tantric drawings I wrote about in a previous post. They seem related in their minimal use of shape, but the motivations and ends are so different. However, I have similar emotional tugs towards all these works: a feeling of expanse, and, at the same time, depth.

So of course I wanted to honor Malevich with a ruglet. I found White on White fascinating in the subtlety of color and value, so made a diptych with pale values of yellow and blue, barely differentiated, barely showing us their shapes.
(please click on the image to see this work more clearly)



Pale Pair (for Malevich), 2007, hand dyed wool on linen, 2 pieces: 12 x 12 inches each

An Article on My Hooked Ruglets

I'm very pleased that The Textile Blog, written by John Hopper, has just published an article on my ruglets. You can see it here. It's interesting for me to see my work described within the context of the ongoing art and tradition of textiles. The piece above was also highlighted on Fibercopia, another blog about textiles.

(please use the search labels on the right to find posts on textiles or recipes, paintings, or flowers and fruit)

Some Views of the Late Garden

It's a beautiful morning, crisp and clear. The temperature is just below freezing; the pond has a slight coating of white over its frozen surface, a ghost shape in the pale brown landscape. Looking out from the front windows, I noticed how the dead lengths of daylily leaves looked like layers of fluid lines drawn on the earth, rhythmically catching the light. So of course I went outdoors with my camera; while outdoors, enjoying the air and thin sunlight, I noticed other images around the house.




Another type of calligraphy, more spare and lyrical, was drawn by branches of honeysuckle curving across the expanse of blue.




The spirea by the front porch, still flowering in October, is the only plant showing fall color now that we're entering winter. Its thin leaves are glowing against the subtle colors surrounding them.




The mass of Hydrangea Annabelle have browned and their leaves have fallen, leaving flower heads swaying on long stems. I enjoy looking at these remnants of summer throughout the winter, though they look more bedraggled as time goes by. I cut them back in early spring, opening the space for vigorous new growth.

"Lean" in Progress

The ruglet Lean is well underway. Once the wool fabric is dyed, my main aesthetic decisions have to do with the direction of the hooking. I decided to hook the vertical rectangle by following its four sided outline, from outer edge till the hooked rows met in the center. I felt that this made the form seem more solid––a thing to lean on––than it would using parallel vertical lines. After outlining the green form, I tried using a random hooking pattern, but didn't like it, realizing that the shape needed to be emphasized by following its outlines. I'm still not sure how I'll hook the reddish background; it'll be either random or horizontal, to contrast with the strong vertical.

I always enjoy looking at a ruglet at this stage of its making, with lines of wool creating a strong simple image against the neutral linen background. I've often thought of how I can use this for other ruglet designs, with line and shape playing against each other. In 2006 I did the piece below, inspired by just this element in the hooking process.



Moderne, 2006, 12 x 10 inches