Art & Motherhood (& Sandwiches).

Yeah, so today I was reading Alison Bechdel's "Are You My Mother?" while I was eating my fried egg & Brussels sprout sandwich for lunch (take "today" loosely because I am am currently post bath nursing Iris & can't imagine that I will actually finish this tonight). Anyway.

Set the scene. Iris is napping. I'm at the kitchen table by the window & the poetry books. 

Nice November light today. Bare trees, pale sunlight. 

Sandwich. Fried eggs, two of them, sliced bread, cheddar cheese, last night's leftover battered deep fried Brussels sprouts...there they are.

(See, this is still a food blog!). Lots of mayo & sriracha. I've got a cup of cold coffee from the morning. 

I'm reading. I'm eating fast, because who knows when the tiny human will wake up. 

And I'm reading Alison Bechdel, & she's referencing Adrienne Rich on motherhood, & I'm seated right there by all of Adrienne Rich's books, & I wonder, can you really be an artist & a mother? And do either on properly, the way you really want to? Can I? 

I always believe that you could, but actually being a mother, I don't know. I can't even write this post. 

I personally am so self centered when I make art, & I think I really need to be in that place where I put art first to do it well. 

And now I put Iris first, & can barely complete a thought. 

I feel like having Iris is the most important thing I've ever done & I would rather do this than have my opportunity to be self centered & make art back, but still. Do I want the same thing for her? Or do I want her to be famous & fabulous & everything she could ever possibly want?

Does anyone know?  

I don't know why I had such a moment there. Maybe I should just focus on sandwiches. It was a great sandwich. The eggs were freshly gathered from our chickens & I fried them in butter in a cast iron skillet & melted the cheese on top in the pan. 

And ha, Iris is sleeping on my lap now, so maybe I'll just post this as is. 

Happy Friday night, world, here at the homestead we are having spicy duck soup & homemade biscuits for dinner. 

And listening to Britney Spears. And still contemplating the meaning of motherhood. 

Eating & Drawing @ Flying Object.

Hello! Here I am! Still here, yeah. Lots of exciting developments here at EnD. 

First, I had this show! Eating & Drawing heads out of the sketchbook & into the big crazy world. The very excellent food blogger Jono of the brilliant Oil Changes  curated this show of my food watercolors, featuring, of course, DustyRose, at Flying Object, in Hadley, Massachusetts.The opening was last night. It pretty much ruled. I know some amazing people 'round these parts. You know who you are. Much love.

Western Massachusetts people, have you checked out Flying Object? You should, because it is pretty great, & also because MY SHOW IS UP THROUGH MARCH 11th! OMG! You yes you, could enjoy all this fabulous art in person. I know, it's mind blowing. Think on that.

 Ok, so, let's go back a bit, to last December...I was on track, planning my holiday food blogging, looking forward to on catching up on my sketchbook archives...when during a random craigslist browsing session, I found our dream rental (since owning land is still just a dream). Free standing cottage, lots of land & garden space, & I can't even believe this still, it came with a chicken coop & even a chicken! All that stuff we really wanted wrapped up in a neat little package.

Since then, we have somehow acquired three more pullet Rhode Island Reds (one of them laid her first egg Friday, just before I left to hang my show-seemed like a present from Lulu), & more recently 26 (there were 27. Very sadly, we lost one.) of the most adorable baby chicks you ever saw (I know all baby chicks are that adorable. But whatever, mine are cuter).  

We are now reporting to you here at EnD from our new, much more rural headquarters in North Greenfield, Massachusetts. Our nearest neighbor is a dairy farm. I love it. 

Needless to say, the blog has been on hold what with moving & art show & chickens. But I'm happy to be back. I've got some things to say, & some things to draw before my standard summer garden season hiatus.

Looks for chicken paintings soon! If you are in the area, go see the show!

Tabloid Portraits #1: Bret, LiLo & A Shout Out To Magazines.

This post has nothing to do with food. Zero. If you are a dedicated food reader only, go to the archives, or come back later.
I repeat, nothing about cooking here, except in the rather roundabout way where last night I had dinner simmering on the stove & was waiting for Owen to come home from work at the restaurant. 
Note: our kitchen table is currently (frequently) covered in trashy celebrity magazines, thanks both to my lovely co-worker who donates me hers & to my own personal difficulty in resisting the lure of the magazine rack at the 7-11. Also present on the EnD table: ample food magazines & piles of New Yorkers (family lifelong subscription). If you are old fashioned & still enjoy print media, please come on over to our house.
I was having a pleasant time listening to the Silver Jews & drinking wine & messing around in my sketchbook.
As I do, I got to drawing. Normally, I do this with my magazines, but sometimes I like to mix things up. 

"I'm Glad To Be Here/Living In Fear"

 "Wasted Again"

Maybe painting a portrait of Bret Michaels indicates that I have too much time on my hands. IDK. I did grow up in the 80's. I though Poison was pretty great when I was ten.The reality show/stardom thing does confuse me a bit though.
I have been known to fixate on celebrities, if they are the good ones. (I think I summed up what I mean by that here). But my great love of magazines & a print media isn't about that, really. I've always been an old school magazine reading kind of girl. Take that internet! I wish this blog was a zine (yup, I did attend high school in the early 90's.)
Magazines: you can cut them up, you can hang the pictures up on the wall, I find them way easier to draw from than the internet, you can read them in the bath or on the beach or on a boat or any other place you wouldn't bring a laptop, you can write in the margins, you can draw mustaches on people, you can photocopy them & use them for silkscreens, you can make wallpaper... What the hell can you do with an internet page, exactly.
Celebrity news means nothing to me if I can't involve scissors & glue somehow.
That's the collage artist in me, but that's also the reader. Of books with pages. & the general object-loving thrift storing hoarder that I am.
Here's to thanking Christ that we don't live in a completely virtual world yet.
I like it tangible & messy.
(Oh & thanks Amy for the Stars).

Piles Of Noodles, PIles Of Opinions.

Welcome to my controversial world of noodles. Linguine, fettuccine, elbow macaroni, whatvever, noodles have also been one of my favorite things to draw. Long long long before I had a food blog I was painting piles of noodles everywhere. For example, this classic painting of mine: 

"219", Acrylic on canvas, 2005

So, visually,  I am all about the noodles. Gastronomically, they are actually not my first go to comfort food, or at the least not the classic Italian style pasta variety. I am a chickpea curry girl all the way, or spicy beef & soba. Milkshakes & onion rings, I'm all over that. I believe I have mentioned my opinion on the general American trend of paying way too much money for a large plate of crappy pasta, & eating it in a mall, probably. Why not eat cheap food with some complexity & flavor, a bowl of pho or steamed pork bun? & We all know my Grampa Diamond's strong opinions on red sauce.  I guess it's a family thing. 

That said, there is more to do with a box of fettuccine than dump some jar of sauce from the grocery store over it .  

2.10.10: Homemade Red Sauce, With Bacon, Chicken, & Veggies. 

 3.2.10: Angel Hair, In White Wine & Butter, With Summer Squash, Thyme & Mushrooms. 

I guess behind my ranting & raving ala Anthony Bourdain about the Olive Garden (we actually saw him do this that night) is that both these meals weren't particularly creative, didn't cost much money, hardly took any real time or effort & were delicious. Learn to cook your own food, rather than throwing away money on crappy American chain restaurants, please. Seriously, learn to cook, y'all, at least enough to cook some veggies in butter & olive oil, chop some garlic & onions, & boil water.
This is the lesson in the noodles.
(It is still very much winter, although it is March, I am therefore apparently still cranky). 

I Tried To Make A Pretty Food Drawing, & This Is What Happened.

I made a truly beautiful, garden greens based dinner last night, & tonight attempted to draw it, in the usual fashion employed on this blog. Somehow, something went wrong. I've been trying to confine my collage side to this sort of thing, but I don't know, maybe forced separation never works. I started drawing *seriously* again because I felt like at DnD I wasn't taken seriously because I just glued shit together, so I started this drawing blog/collage blog nonsense. Of course, in my life as an artist, this is maybe the 300th time I quit collage, tried to draw like a *real* artist, got bored with that, collaged more, decided my collages were stupid, started trying to look like a RISD graduate again. Oh but wait, RISD painters hate the illustrators anyway, so what the fuck am I trying to do? Trying to figure out the conflict between people thinking my drawings of plants are pretty & only being happy gluing scraps of paper together in the midst of a big mess. Why do I care what people think? Because I have a very expensive prestigious art degree & yet work in a grocery check out aisle for crap money? Naturally low self esteem? You tell me.

Is this an art blog, or a food blog anyway? Collage or drawing or watercolour? Or just mine? I really do love to cook, but I was never able to apply myself fully to truly practical tasks, I was born a fine artist.

That's a lot of talk for one picture. So here's how it is.

The Meal: Napa Cabbage Egg Rolls with a sesame chili dipping sauce, Saag Paneer with white basmati rice, served on a bed of green leaf lettuce (spinach, napa cabbage, lettuce all from yesterday's first major garden harvest at our garden).

The Drawing:

"I need freezer space for party/CRACK." 6.8.2010.

I guess my true colours just came out.

Scrabble & Winter Vegetables & Art.

2.3.2010. We have a Scrabble/Art/Soup/Roasted Stuffed Squashes & Other Root Vegetables Party here at 133.

It was sort of an organic collision of my inviting Rin & guest over for a double date dinner party with Owen & I, & Abigail throwing a Soup & Super Scrabble party, at exactly the same time. The food was delicious, the Scrabble game was fierce, Pandora pretended we were at the Basement for some reason, & Rin, Owen, & I (not being the Scrabble types) made some art on the living floor together (while the world's most hilarious books were being read aloud, yet again). Damn, the lessons we learned from the Book Swap are endless. Oh, David Deida, you've given us all so much.

Rin's drawing of Owen & I collaging together.

"Stuffed Squashes/An Inferiority Complex", by me.

"Self Portrait via Show Magazine", by me.

Rin's.

"Soup & Ass", by me.

& Owen's.

(He never glued anything down, but he cut out a lot, so I dumped all the cuttings on the scanner & here's what we have. Pretty freaking awesome. Thanks again, Show Magazine! )

That's the art. Oh, wait, what's this blog called? Oh right, EATING & Drawing. So what did we eat? Well, I was still playing the "work with what you have" game, so mostly this meal was shaped by free stuff from work, but it turned out rather well, in my humble opinion. (Note: this vegan dinner party). I made acorn squashes stuffed with a wild rice blend I made of some pre-mixed blend, wild rice, & short grain brown basmati, crimini mushrooms, spinach, thyme, tofu, onions, & garlic, with a side of rosemary/olive oil roasted sweet potatoes, yukon gold potatoes, & summer squash. Abigail made a soup of (from what I remember from watching) sweet potatoes, chickpeas, watermelon radishes, coconut milk, IDK, it was very good, yay food, we like it. A good combination of things, food creations, games, mixed media, watercolours, drawing, eating, drinking, over the top ridiculous sex/relationship books, trashy music, & friends. & of course, the world's best cat & dog, DustyRose & MelodyRose.

This post is dedicated to the works of David Deida & the ladies of Show Magazine for providing oh so much laughter & inspiration...heart heart heart.

love & gratitude & footstools & plastic deer & pink vintage suits

This weekend. Was really great. Not that weekends should mean anything to be because I'm still unemployed, and they usually don't really, but I decided in advance that I need something right now in terms of pleasure, and that I was going to have a weekend, and then everything actually worked out that way, I don't know, I spend too much time alone worrying, I need a change, at least occasionally.
(this is going to be a really boring post of what I did this weekend that no one but me could ever possibly care about, just warning you)
So friday morning I woke up after sort of an important night with s. and was having a pleasant rainy day doing laundry and reading a lot, and was so happy with the warm rainy foggy weather, and was ok with a night at home but then b. called with the free sarah vowell tickets, and really all day I'd been kind of sad that I was missing that, so I was both excited to go, plus I am always kind of overly excited and humbled when people remember me or offer things to me or are especially kind to me, and it's not even like this is that rare, it's more that I never feel like I deserve it, or understand on some level why people care about me. I know, I have weird high/low self esteem.
So friday night was great, then saturday it was a kind of a beautiful day at least for the last day of February in new england anyway, very sunny and reasonably not freezing, and I got up and drove to noho and bought the world's largest scone (strawberry & walnut) from the haymarket and ate it on the steps of the church on main street in the sun writing in my journal for the first time since fall and had that awesome conversation with ali and went to the art supply store and was greeted so pleasantly by friends and then had a truly wonderful trip to savers with b. and s. and spent more than three hours there and had so much fun and acquired a footstool that randomly matches all my furniture and a bag full of plastic forest creatures and a truly awe-inspiring hot pink vintage suit and really enjoyed spending good thrift store time with people with excellent taste and came home and s. came over and I made thai beef curry and we had a really nice night. And my dreams were weird and intense but it was still really nice waking up in his arms.
I think I'm happy. And in terms of my recent past, I realized while driving my car this morning that NOT being unhealthily attached to a person in a super intense obsessive way does not mean that I don't like them, and I should stop comparing this to that other thing because it's really pretty great as it is.
Then today, sunday, I had a very lovely morning here with s. and then picked up r. and went to that opening (can't talk about that yet) and then we had lunch and had good art conversation and I'm really excited about the art project but I managed to get myself in a weird, sad mood on my drive home and it was hard to shake it.
My itunes shuffle keeps playing classic pavement in droves and it's very very nice. And wilco. Nice and relaxing and pleasant for a sunday night, especially since doing my required daily food painting rather cured my stupid depressive tendency to dwell on stuff and waste time.
Again, thanks art. I don't know what I'd do without you.

Art Project

I had a really, really nice weekend, but ended with a rather ambivalent sunday night. I got melancholy for a while, for no reason at all...just starting to come out of it. through art. weirdly.
Thank jesus for this collaborative art project with r. (more on the details of this later), I really do need more concrete things to do.
And I hadn't realized how much I miss just painting, with actual brushes and paint, etc.
I really like all the parts this project has...my regular journal/sketchbook, my new food journal, my food porn facebook album, my daily paintings of everything I eat, my facebook album of those pictures, my notes in my regular journal about the project, my official journal of the project, this blog of course I think there will be more,
I wish it was tomorrow so I can eat and draw more things.
I like carrying around all these various notebooks. I feel busy and important. And it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about what I'm doing as long as it feels that way to me. I like having my bag full of pens and glue and words and images.
But I was not in a good mood at all. Just sitting around and staring at things and tormenting myself with my thoughts.
I was really kind of frozen into inactivity, but then r. called, and reminded me about the project, and a tiny part of my brain woke up.
I HAVE to do this one food painting everyday, so I did it, and I liked what I did, and now I'm not in such as bad place. Hmm.
In terms of things in my life I am grateful for, this is way up there.

deadline

I'm giving myself until spring to get over this, then I need to move on. And by "spring" I mean the official spring solstice, in many ways the holiest day of the year, and by "this" I mean I need to let go of a whole lot of anger and resentment and regret and everything to do with the whole foods saga.
I was suspended just days after the winter solstice, and fired the day before new years eve, so if this ends on the first day of spring, this will have been one complete season of my life.
And winter is traditionally the season of death and rebirth...which is what this winter has been for me, absolutely.
So it will be quite fitting if this period in my life takes exactly one season.
And my relationship with emerson fitted neatly into one season, fall, so that works too.
Fall has always been my favorite season, and so many parts of that relationship were pure pleasure, even though it ended badly. And I started dating him just days before my 30th birthday, and my birthday is always an important day for me.
And 30 should have ended my saturn return, I believe.
But spring. Spring will be something new.
I've really been working on myself this winter, seeing myself through something very dark born out of my own heart.
Come spring, I'm going to be ready for gardens, for sunshine, for dancing, for art, and for trust again, maybe.
Winter 2008-2009 I think I will always remember as the time I really got to know myself. Was always alone with myself. And it was scary and I cried a lot and always woke up in a panic, but look, now I sleep through the night again. I've accepted a lot of things. I've learned how to be grateful, that none of this is by any means the end of the world. That I am so so so thankful that this is the worst I've had to deal with, really I'm very lucky.
I've lost a lot of friends, but the ones I still have, are amazing. awe-inspiring. my family is amazing and awe-inspiring.
Spring is going to bring a lot more art work.
I still wake up thinking about him every single fucking day. Three more weeks, then that has to stop.
I think on the first day of spring I need to perform some sort of ritual. I don't know what yet, but I either need to set a bunch of things on fire or throw things off a cliff into the ocean.
When I got divorced almost three years ago a lot of people told me I needed to take the time to deal with it, even if it was hard, and I didn't.
I'm doing it now.
And I'm going to be at least a reasonably functional version of liz again, soon.

((tiny related thoughts))

I thought for a split second in the exhibit tonight that what I should be doing is being an eating disorder counselor for teenaged girls. I think I could do that.
Very well.
And maybe even help someone who might otherwise die. Like I almost did.
How do I even go about doing that?
(plus all this train of thought has huge relevance to my visual artwork that I can't even begin to deal with right now...but I'm aware of the connections...
...body image, celebrities, porn, britney, food, yeah I get it...or am trying too)

valentines eve & other weird painful shit: Part #2: Shame

Tonight I was confronted with a lot of weird painfully deeply difficult to process things that take me back to my deepest darkest parts, the stuff that keeps me up at night. All night.
So I saw emerson tonight. That happened.
Earlier, I met b. at the Smith Art Museum, because it was Northampton Arts Night Out, and when the Smith Museum is free (as it should always be, of course) and Lauren Greenfield's Thin & Girl Culture was at the Smith Museum
That was really good, but weird and hard for me, because it was a lot of photos of women with eating disorders, and eating disorder stuff is still oh so indescribably hard for me to deal with, and I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to write about it tonight. Still the hardest thing for me to talk about/deal with/acknowledge in anyway/think about.
Even though the year when I regularly weighed under 100 pounds was when I was 14, so 16 years ago now.
I've been living pretty much as normal and appearing normal for 16 years. weird.
To be clear, I can talk about it, in a very specific way, a way that I've created, a language I've created, where I can mention certain controlled truths, and act like I'm dealing with it, but that actually never really even scratches the surface. Of what I've done. Of what I've felt. Of how I still live.
I certainly don't talk about it in the present tense. It's 10:50pm and all I've eaten all day is a single yogurt. I'm fighting with myself with what I'll eat next. Since I've been fired, I can at least on some level see that I'm exercising compulsively (now 205 situps a day plus all this other stuff) but I can't stop. I love when people buy me dinner, because then I'm allowed to eat whatever I want without following my rules.
I eat plenty, and I maintain a normal weight, mostly, but the amount of rules, involved, I know it's not normal, whatever that is, because I can't find the words to talk about. I would never, ever tell anyone what I really think when it comes to eating.
I eroticize it, I play games, I deny myself things...I think this why I want to just go live on a farm because I figure if I was really in touch with food and the sources of my food than all this nonsense my intellectual mind knows is silly and ridiculous would go away.
Gardening helps. That's why I do it. Inpatient eating disorder units should have gardens. And animals. Really.
The show we saw tonight had all these photos of girls being forced to eat cookies, but what if they had to raise chickens and then kill and eat them? Or just gather eggs? That seems like something that would have shaken me out of my self obsession as a teenager. In a good way. And eating disorders are always a self obsession. not that you can stop it just because you know this.
Send all anorexics to sustainable farms and see what happens. seriously.
Food I create myself has less guilt. Food I cook myself does too.
Something about labor, hands, work, touch....
So seeing those photographs...I was almost in tears by the time I left that exhibit. I was choking in my throat.
Not in a bad way. I was really glad I saw it. But it wasn't easy. I think a lot of the point of my own work is that I'm trying so hard to conceive of a language in which to talk about these things.
I need to talk about them. It's part of why I am an artist.
Someone should. And that show tonight, that all from an observer's perspective, because most of those girls photographed are too fucked up to make their own art.
I want to be the voice from the inside, the one who was just that bad, but survived anyway. And I will survive what is happening to me now.
So it was an intense evening in my soul already...
And then I was walking alone down main street in the cold back to my car and standing at the light at the main intersection waiting to cross, and I look over my shoulder behind me for some reason I still can't figure out (ali says I was looking for him) and I see first one member of his band, then the next, and I knew what was coming but it happened so fast, then him, come around the corner, and I didn't know what to do, so I looked away, but I'm pretty sure he saw me, and looked away too, and walked past me.
And then I felt like crying again and I still do.
Both of these are things I'm ashamed of.
That I've treated and still treat my body this way. That I loved him and trusted him and that he treated me this way.
Shame.
That ties this whole night together.
And a lot of my recent life.
In the recent past I've been on my knees in front of one person while someone who likes me sincerely called me on the phone to make plans with me. And have been at the computer at 1am eating leftover homemade curry and dirty instant messaging two different people with the same first same name at the same time.
Shame.
What's going on here?
Starving myself/loving the wrong people. A lot to think about.
And it's almost valentines day...and I take holidays, even stupid ones seriously, because I love ceremony.
It's gonna be a long night.
Thanks sweet jesus that K. made me a 21 love songs mix for valentines day that arrived unexpectedly in the mail this morning, along with this month's cosmo (An Orgasm Almost Killed Her: we are not kidding)(actual headline).
and I'm gonna listened to that truly excellent mix and write my heart out and drink cheap white wine and eat a chicken sandwich from the food the guy who doesn't eat much left behind.
good for me. I am embracing having an appetite. I think I'll make curried chicken salad.
Fuck shame. So what I loved him and I was wrong. He should be ashamed, and he is, cause he can't even look me in the face. Fuck that.
I've got a lot more to write on this subject, I think. Stay tuned.

more from my apartment tonight

I don't why, but ani's really nice tonight.
Two quotes from "knuckle Down" which I generally think is just a terrible album, and I've never really listened to, I can't stop playing over and over again. Again, it's probably been ten years since I seriously listened to ani difranco. But I guess I made the correct random choice tonight.
"come home and my guitar
has nothin to say to me
i recoil from all my friends
and then i'm in misery
been so long since i've been held
really since i was his
probably just need to be held
that's probably all it is"
-ani, "recoil"
"but you can't will yourself happy
you can't will your cunt wet
you can't keep standing at the station
pretending you're being met
you can't wear a sign that says 'yours'
when that ain't what you get"
-ani, "callous"
....other little things about tonight...I've been reading Julia Child's memoir, "My Life In France, " and that's making me incredibly happy. And she didn't learn to cook at all until she was 36, so maybe there is serious hope for me. Maybe I will have my restaurant someday. And she found the love of her life in her late 30's, and they lived happily ever after, complete with delicious food, so again, hope...
...I found a completely brand new "clear head" candle from whole foods in the bathroom that I had forgotten I had and that's making the apartment much better...
...last night I stayed up late reading and working in my sketchbook, not messing around pointlessly on the internet and I think it might happen again tonight...(except then why am I writing in this blog?)
...even though it's late I just did some yoga, and now I feel bendy and calmer...
...my tarot card for tonight was the Hawk, Messenger, "do not let your emotions cloud your perceptions. Examine your life from a higher perspective." When don't I let my emotions cloud my perceptions...hmmm.

why britney? (Most of life is unsettling and I think it's comforting to see that reflected in art)

(some thoughts on art to make up for all the recent drivel about boys)
Most of life is unsettling and I think it's comforting to see that reflected in art.
This has something to do with britney spears, and with tabloid headlines. What I like about tabloid headlines (reminds me that I need to go check out this week's headlines) is that they are expressing these huge raw human truths in these giant yellow letters. "IM SORRY" "HUMILIATING BETRAYAL" etc and usually you can find some expression of some drama going on in your personal life expressed in some magazine in the grocery aisle. like just after my most recent break up I found "HOW COULD YOU" and more recently "THE FEUD GETS WORSE" (haha who's that refer to?).
using britney specifically first of all ties all this in to one story which I think sets some boundaries first of all, because I'm working within the confines of actual events in the life of britney spears, and also provides some visual continuity, rather than if I was using every possible celebrity drama.
Britney Spears, too, more than anyone else, obviously symbolized "the raw messy details" which is the theme of my current work.
Before all the bad stuff even started happening to her, britney was over the top and unreal in a way that other celebrities just are not.
I find visually the progression from the lolita/candy imagery of her earlier career to now with the crisis/mental illness headlines to contain a lot of moments that are really relateable to being a human being, but done in this over the top ultra theatrical kind of way.
I think mental illness and breakdowns and heartache and tears are the things that people like to keep under wraps and not bring out into the open, and in britney case they are being shoved under a giant stoplight.
the headline glued into the front of my current sketchbook reads "from breakdown to center stage"
I think that's such a great sentence, thanks people magazine or whatever.
All the work I've done with britney genuinely makes people uncomfortable, and it's not actually that easy to make people uncomfortable with visual artwork, especially if you're not using really violent or sexual imagery (which I also do but I'm trying not to overdo it).