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Day #32 Groggy |
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
AM I MY FEELINGS?
Dearest
Readers,
A few
years ago I initiated a daily artistic test to answer the existential question,
“Who Am I?”– specifically, ** “Am I my
thoughts and feelings?” 500 years ago, the French philosopher and mathematician
Rene Descartes thought so. He famously declared, “Cogito ergo sum”…”I think
therefore I am”. He ignored the
squishier category of feelings. As I age, and look at my mortality, I’ve been using
art as a language of self-discovery. My process is often diaristic and
quotidian. I think this harkens back to my Catholic upbringing. Repetitive
prayers like the rosary, saying novenas (prayers for 9 days, 9 months or some
sequence of 9’s), or walking the 14 Stations of the Cross were predicated on
the idea that if one held a question or prayer in mind, an answer might be
forthcoming after sequential repetition. I am not religious anymore in this manner, but the
residual practice often emerges as an artistic framework.
“How Am I Feeling
Today?” is
a series of self-portraits of my feelings in a variety of media and paper stocks.
They are based on 89 days of morning photos I shot of my face in 2009 staring
into my bathroom mirror. Each day I
asked myself to name my feeling of the moment. (bored, calm, groggy, nervous
etc.)
I wrote the feeling in lipstick on my forehead and photographed my face in
the mirror. Last year I began to paint and draw each one. I’ve completed about
60 so far. There are 89 photos, the number of years my Mother lived, a-not-so-obvious
layer of meaning and self -identity for me.
Fifty-five
of these portraits are now on view at The Dalton Gallery at Agnes Scott College
in Decatur, GA as part of the show, Material Witness. If you are in the
Atlanta area this Saturday, Nov.16, there will be a closing reception from 3-6pm.
Three artists and myself will be speaking briefly at 4:15 about our work. I
hope you can join us. Food and drink will be served. The address is 141 College Avenue, but the gallery is
actually on McDonough St just off College.
I’m
posting the remaining portraits as I complete them on Facebook–usually one a week. “Moody” is the
current one.
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**ANSWER: I quickly discovered that I’m
not my feelings, or my thoughts. They change rapidly throughout the day, and
from moment to moment. I think Descartes was using the idea of thinking as a
way to describe consciousness as the seat of self. I tend to agree with him…but
that’s a subject for another artistic endeavor.
Friday, November 8, 2013
THE PATIENT PRACTICE OF BAKING BREAD
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Success! |
Dearest
Readers,
Behold
my beautiful loaf of home-made white bread–warm, crusty, aromatic, and earthy. It’s been a two-month journey of
trial and error, several failures and adjustments to bread recipes to arrive at
this successful loaf.
I love
bread. Good bread. It’s comfort food from my childhood. Living in New Jersey as
a youngster in the 50’s, my Dad brought home crunchy deli Kaiser rolls, and
long loaves of Italian bread. Mom refused to buy the fluffy white brands of
sliced bread, allowing only Pepperidge Farm. When we moved to Rutland, Vermont
in 1962, Mom often bought bakery bread.
Here’s my
rocky journey to this golden loaf:
September
15: I took a 3-hour sourdough class at King Arthur Flour Baking School in Norwich VT.
Sharon O’Leary
at King Arthur, demonstrates how to mix, handle, form, knead and bake
sourdough.
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Hands on experience in rolling the dough into a ball |
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Shaping the dough into batards (and round shapes) |
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The class's final baked round sourdough loaves |
Each of
us in the class leaves with a loaf we baked, a small amount of starter culture
and the phase 1 batch of dough we mixed.
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First mix of sourdough ingredients and the starter culture |
Sept.
16th: I begin my car trip back to Georgia with the dough and culture
in a cooler in the car.
Sept.
23: I leave Brooklyn heading south again. It dawns on me in Delaware that I’ve
forgotten the culture, the preliminary dough, and the cooler in my daughter’s apartment
in Brooklyn.
Around
Oct. 1st I email King Arthur Flour’s help site and they send me
another starter culture via UPS free of charge. The living blob of wild yeast
and flour arrives healthy, and happily ready to grow.
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New batch of sourdough starter culture |
Three
tries at making my own sourdough bread ends in flat failures, sticky dough and a
final tough culture starter. I did something wrong!
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sourdough bread #1-flat and misshapen |
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sourdough #2-barely rising |
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sourdough #3-sticky and tough |
I
release from my mind the romantic notion of maintaining a live, friendly sourdough culture in my fridge that I will feed weekly
with flour. Goodbye idea!
Friend
and bread baker Julie Puttgen sent me a link to a delicious no-knead bread
recipe that she used to make a couple of round loaves when I visited her home in
Lebanon, NH this summer. It's cooked in a dutch oven in the oven:
I
adjusted this recipe three times, trying, and finally succeeding at the right proportion
of ingredients. Maybe altitude has something to do with the necessary changes???
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No-knead bread #1-flat and small |
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No-knead bread dough #2-rising nicely |
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No-knead bread dough #2-second rising on a smooth towel per the recipe |
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Scraping off the dough from the second rising stuck on the cloth |
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No-knead bread #2-tiny loaf due to so much dough stuck on the towel |
During the preparation for Bread #3, my oven dies, but my
neighbor with a nice digital stove comes to the rescue.
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My oven refuses to light completely |
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Neighbor Mary Alma saves the day with her new stove |
The King Arthur Flour site has plenty of bread and pastry recipes. Here's King Arthur's recipe for kaiser rolls:
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/kaiser-rolls-recipe![]() |
kaiser rolls picture from the Taste of Home website |
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
NEW DAWN
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New Dawn, oil, acrylic, pastel, and charcoal on canvas, 41"x42" |
Dearest
Readers,
Meet
the latest iteration of my painting Golden Dawn. She’s no longer golden, but
does still represent a personal awakening…this upsurge in positivity and contentment that
I’ve noticed in my being. Death still lurks as a spoiler, but that’s not on the
“horizon”, so to speak.
Back in
early September I took you on a blog-journey
through
the various lives of Golden
Dawn, from initial ground
to a raw, vegetal creature,
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Golden Dawn, middle stage |
ending with a
kaleidoscopic double swirl that I labeled as “finished”.
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Golden Dawn, "Finished" |
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Golden Dawn, Additional Adjustments |
I was holding on to parts that I liked, but
that just did not work.
This
weekend I opened my stash of oils and made some serious changes. With a glass
of wine as moral support, and a deep sigh, I slashed away at the former acrylic
painting, leaving translucent areas, and reworking the double swirl, which is
the essence of my resurgence. I also pinned
up a page from the Portland Oregon Gallery Guide as inspiration showing the abstract
oil paintings of Barbara Sternberger whose courageous style I admire. I viewed them this summer at Elizabeth Leach Gallery.
I’m
happy with the result.
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New Dawn |
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