Creamy. Delicate. Fresh. Light.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic on paper. The paper is no ordinary paper, it is textured Hahnemuhle 300 gsm 100% alpha cellulose which is acid-free fibre of vegetable origin. 

In this piece I was aiming for a fun, quirky and modern illustrative stencil or screenprint style on layers of lush glazing. In some cultures spinach and other leafy greens symbolise money and and abundant crops. So a money tree seemed appropriate.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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The meatless meals recipe

Hooray, a yummy pasta dish that does not involve tomatoes! I'm sure the spinach sauce here could be turned into a very respectable soup, and minus the pasta the dish would make a rather nice warm salad.

pasta for two (risoni is nice with this)

2 teaspoons butter

250g spinach, washed and chopped

1/2 onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup strong stock

1/4 cup white wine

150ml cream

about 200g broccolini or broccoli, cut into small bite size strips

1 red capsicum, cut into bite size slices

1 avocado, sliced (optional)

100g bocconcini (optional)

Cook your pasta with a pinch of salt and a dash of oil.

Melt 1 teaspoon butter in a pan.

Soften the onion and garlic.

Add spinach, stock, wine and cream.

Simmer until spinach is well cooked.

Remove from heat and puree.

(Add bocconcini)

Meanwhile, put the broccolini and capsicum pieces in a frypan on high heat with the other teaspoon of butter, and basically stirfry until the capsicum has softened and the broccolini is bright green. A dash or two of water may help. If the broccolini starts to grey, STOP COOKING!! That's the sign of impending vege blandness!

To serve, pile the pasta into bowls, top with the veges (plus avocado). Then drown the lot in the spinach sauce.

Feeds 2.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic and oil on paper. The paper is no ordinary paper, it is textured Hahnemuhle 300 gsm 100% alpha cellulose which is acid-free fibre of vegetable origin. 

This design is known as a kolam. These are drawn fresh every morning in front of each house in southern parts of India with a handheld stream of rice flour. Special events call for really elaborate designs. The designs are learned, usually based around a grid of dots, and handed down in families. There are variations galore.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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Aviyal - the vegetarian dinner recipe

Although this is a South Indian style curry, it could easily pass for a Thai green curry. Bizarre but true.

3 tablespoons desiccated coconut

3 cups stock

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

2 cloves garlic

1-2 green chillies, deseeded

1 cup coconut milk

6 curry leaves
6 1/2 cups mixed vegetables such as pumpkin, carrots, beans, capsicum, zucchini, cucumber, eggplant, all julienned

salt to taste

Put the cumin, garlic, chilli and desiccated coconut in a blender with a little of the stock and whizz until nice and smooth.
Put this paste along with the rest of the stock, coconut milk and curry leaves in a pot.
Add the veges one type at a time, beginning with those that take the longest to cook.
When all the veges are in the pot and cooked, simmer uncovered for five minutes.
Serve with rice.

Makes 4-6 serves.

Where do you get your news?

I get all of mine online. That's right, I've given up on the telly and newspapers entirely. But that's not actually what I meant by my question.

For example, I find it incredibly odd that here in Australia we get next to no mainstream news about our closest geographical neighbours New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Indonesia. Only if there is a major coup or natural disaster or some Australians were killed do we hear anything from these countries. When it comes to what's going on overseas, all we ever seem to hear is English and American news.

So I get all my news online. I read several newspapers online. I am subscribed to a gazillion special interest blogs. I have Google Alerts set up for specific topics that I want to know all about. I rely on Twitter to tell me of any major international incidents. So do I hear from a wide variety of sources? No. I'll explain in a minute.

I was already aware that my sources of information were quite limited. If they weren't then logically I'd hear about what's going on in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Indonesia, amongst others. But I don't and it has bothered me for some time without me doing much about it. And then I watched this TED talk on how we tend to only gather news from sources that are people like us. That cuts out a lot of interesting happenings and points of view and is exactly the trap I had fallen into.

If you're curious about what's going on in the world like I am, it makes sense to look for sources of news outside your country and also outside of your usual social networks. What other way is there to hear from places underrepresented in your mainstream media than to look beyond your own media? What other way is there to gain completely different perspectives but to listen to people who have lives completely different to your own?

In the spirit of seeing a problem and asking 'how can I?' instead of 'why can't I?'...

How can I source news more widely?

Here are some of my suggestions:

Where do you go to hear what's on outside your usual circle?

Photo courtesy of Tony₂

Filling. Rich. Homely. Sweet.

This is an ancient recipe in our family, too rarely trotted out. I have this in my recipe collection in my grandmothers handwriting on a faded and beaten up piece of paper. It makes a fabulous dessert for a group of people.  I remember eating it when I was a kid. I was fond of it then and still am now.

2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 1/2 cups mashed, sieved pumpkin
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cup milk (or evaporated milk or light cream etc)
1 x 9" unbaked pastry shell (shortcrust)

Mix filling ingredients in order given.
Pour into pastry shell.
Bake in a hot oven (425F) for 12 mins (omit this step for a prebaked pastry shell)
Reduce temperature to moderate (350F) and continue baking for 45 minutes until filling is set.

Garnish the pie with whipped cream, toasted coconut , chopped nuts etc.

Serves at least 8.

As the final installment of my investigations into artist's canvas, this time I'm looking at canvas keys, gallery wrapped canvas vs traditional profile canvas and the idea of unstretched canvas.

Previous related posts cover all about painting substrates, all about the types of artists canvas and stretching your own canvas.

Canvas Keys

Some stretched canvasses come with little wooden wedges. What are these for? They are known as canvas keys. They should fit into slots in the inner corners of the canvas stretcher. They are a traditional method for tightening up a canvas that has begun to sag. Unfortunately, they are not a very good method for doing this. Any canvas that has developed a sag should be carefully taken off it's stretcher and re-stretched.

Using canvas keys to take the sag out of a painting risks damaging the painting. It is possible to accidentally hammer the back of the painting if the keys are missed, breaking the paint. Using keys puts a great deal of stress on the corners of a painting which can eventually tear the canvas. The keys will invariably change the shape of the stretcher and it will no longer be square and the painting may no longer fit into it's frame, if it had one.

Skip the dodgy canvas keys. Traditional, but not very smart. Take the canvas off the stretcher altogether and re-stretch it!

This video explains the same information in visual form:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSLhkuFO3G0

Bracing a Stretched Canvas

A canvas stretcher or strainer is under quite a bit of tension once a canvas has been secured onto it. They are usually made from timber and so are prone to warping under tension and changing atmospheric conditions. It is recommended that they include a cross-bar every 60 cm (or 2 feet) or so in each direction to help prevent any warping.

Traditional Stretched Canvas

A traditional stretched canvas requires framing. The tacks or staples show on the sides of the finished piece. Traditional canvases also tend to have a shallow profile. They are usually only about half an inch thick from the back of the canvas to the front.

Gallery Wrapped Canvas

This is a very modern style of stretching canvas. The canvas is wrapped around two edges of the stretcher bars and secured at the back where the staples or tacks can't show. Often the sides are painted.  No visible staples or nails means a neat finish is achieved and no framing is required.  Usually this style has quite a deep profile, more than an inch thick from the back of the canvas to the front, though they can also be shallow. The deep profile is the current trend.

Artists love gallery wrapped canvas as their artworks are ready to hang as soon as the varnish is dry. Many art collectors prefer it too as it allows them to skip the often substantial costs of framing. Anecdotally, gallery wrapped canvasses nearly put many framers out of business when it first came out as so many people suddenly didn't require their services. Though if you prefer your art in a frame, as some do, gallery wrapped canvas can be framed if you want.

Unstretched Canvas

It was a revelation to me when I was introduced to the idea of working on unstretched canvas. I was at the exhibition opening of a local artist who had oil pastel paintings on massive canvasses about 1 x 2 m. They were unstretched and looked wonderful.

Depending on your point of view, unstretched canvas is either fabulous or awful to paint on. It has a very different working feel to the drum-like bounce of a stretched canvas. To me it's wonderful and predictable. The give in the surface of a stretched canvas is something I find disconcerting. Different artists, different preferences. I guess it's like working on fabric textured board or paper.

For the artist there are some significant advantages to working on canvas unstretched. There are time savings as no pre-stretching is required. There are financial savings as no stretchers need to be bought. There are space savings as unused canvas can be stored rolled and once painted, can be stacked flat. Believe me, plain canvas takes up a LOT less room than a stack of stretched canvasses. And lastly, unstretched canvas is cheaper to post for a buyer as it weighs less.

For the art collector, unstretched canvas can be presented in a number of already familiar ways. It can be lightly stretched onto stretchers/strainers and ends up looking just like regular stretched canvas.  Or it can be framed just like any paper artwork. For extra rigidity, it can be mounted (glued) to board before framing. All very normal procedures for your framer.

The only downside to unstretched canvas that I can see is that someone needs to frame it.

More art technique articles

This article is one in an ongoing series of technical articles for artists, all archived together and accessible from here. The topics range from details on materials, to the business of art, to specific art techniques. Please make use of this resource.

Versatile. Easy. Homely. Cheesy.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic and pen on paper. The paper is no ordinary paper, it is beige textured Hahnemuhle 300 gsm 100% alpha cellulose which is acid-free fibre of vegetable origin.

'What is the cow for?' The cheese. 'And the dots?' The lentils. 'Oh.'

Sigh. This was going to be a dot painting. When you cut yourself a slice of this loaf, you will see why. Except that in researching and generating ideas, I came across so many wonderful rock art pictures of cows that I changed my mind. Did you know that there is an entire body of rock/cave art in the Libyan Sahara that is so sophisticated that seen out of context it looks just like modern semi-abstract caricatures? I was happily blown away and this cow is in the style discovered.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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The meatless meals recipe

This is one of those meatless meal recipes that works really well in a meat and three veg type dish. It's also yummy cold and on sandwiches. 

9oz / 255g dry lentils

or

390g cooked lentils

6oz / 175g tasty cheese, grated

1 1/2 onions, diced

some cracked black pepper

1 1/2 teaspoons in total of dried rosemary, sage, thyme - use any or all of these

3oz / 85g dried breadcrumbs

3 eggs, beaten

2 1/4 / 68g butter, melted

Cook lentils if using uncooked ones.

In a large mixing bowl, mix cheese, onion, pepper, herbs and lentils.

Then add breadcrumbs, egg and butter. Mix well.

If the mixture is too sloppy it's ok to add more breadcrumbs.

Grease a loaf tin (approx 7 x 10 x 20cm) REALLY well, or line it with greaseproof paper. This is to make the loaf easy to remove as it has a nasty habit of sticking to the bottom of the tin.

Press the mix into the tin. It needs to be well pressed down otherwise it crumbles apart.

Bake for 1 hour at 170 C

Leave to stand and set for 10 minutes after taking it out of the oven and before trying to remove it from the tin.

Slice and serve!  Feeds 4-6, with other veg.

Hearty. Easy. Thrifty. Filling.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic and oil pen on canvas. As the bay leaf is the key to this dish, it is also the subject of the artwork. If you have a bay tree you'll know that the leaves are so much richer, glossier and have far more character to their flavour than their dried equivalent. I wanted to try and capture the simplicity and depth of both the look and taste of the fresh bay leaf. A bit of pop fun seemed to be the best way to do this.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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The meatless meals recipe

This recipe is actually a two for one deal! There's the base recipe and a delicious variation. Both are incredibly simple and I quote, 'bloody delicious'. The bay leaves are essential.

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More vegetarian cookbook goodies

Need help with conversions? Download this handy dandy pdf of cooking conversion charts for every cooking measuring system I could find. It should make your life easier.

Want to check out more vegetarian dinner recipes? They're all in the Table of Contents.

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Artist inspiration and artist influences. No biographies, dates or scholarly research here -  this is a personal response to the work of Criss Canning by Australian artist Fiona Morgan.

Showcasing Criss Canning seemed a natural followup to Margaret Preston of last month. Criss is an artist local to me at the moment. She resides at the wonderful Lambley Nursery, which is a unique nursery specialising in dry tolerant plants. You might expect gardens full of cactii there, but no. There are lush and colourful plants everywhere. The setting is beautiful.

As Criss is quoted saying in her monograph 'The Pursuit of Beauty', "Beauty is really important to me. ... I know beauty is an unfashionable concept today, but for me it is absolutely the key. I believe you cannot overestimate the need for beauty in our lives".

And what beautiful paintings she does.  Even though she specialises in still lifes which are hopelessly old fashioned as a genre, these pieces manage to be grand and have presence. People instantly love her work when they see it. I hate falling into using art-world superlative speak, but... sumptuous describes her work very well.

To me, Criss is clearly influenced by Margaret Preston. I don't know whether she actually is, but the similarities, I think, are striking. There is the strong Japanese influence in the props and the assymetry of the compositions. There is the emphasis on pattern (so many patterns!). And the overall strong graphical/design style with black outlines. Where she differs is COLOUR. Rich vibrant colour everywhere.

Where she really stands out is with her brushwork. If you get a chance to see the originals of her work, go for it. They are not flat paintings. A lot of the texture is missed in the reproduction of these which is a real shame as this to me is the standout feature of her work:

 Official site: http://crisscanning.com.au/

The Creative Cauldron series of posts explores and showcases the visual styles, techniques, attitudes, ideas, artists and paintings that have had the most impact on me. 

The rest of the series is accessible via the Creative Cauldron page. Have a meander if you please, and remember to check out my artworks on Flickr, and have an insider peek at life as an artist on Facebook.

Creamy. Easy. Light. Cheesy.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30 cm acrylic on canvas. Surreal and slightly magical childrens book interpretation involving a spinach forest on a stormy night overlooked by bright cheese stars. I did say surreal didn't I?

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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The meatless meals recipe

This is an aromatic Indian spinach and cheese dish. Many versions of palak paneer include tomatoes but this one is a tomato free zone. Although I am somewhat over Indian cuisine after ODing on it while living in the UK, this is one that I'll happily eat anytime. It does help that it's not arseburningly hot and not overstuffed with onions.

250g spinach, washed thoroughly and chopped fine

1/2 cup stock

1 large bay leaf

3 teaspoons garam masala

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder

a pinch to 1/4 teaspoon chilli powder, or just enough to give a hint of warmth for you

2 cloves garlic, chopped fine

1 1/2 teaspoons cummin seeds

1 tablespoon oil or butter

1 teaspoon grated ginger

100g haloumi or paneer cheese cut into 1 or 2 cm cubes

3 tablespoons creamed cottage cheese or cream

Simmer the spinach on medium heat with HALF the garam masala, all the cinnamon, bay leaf and stock for 20 minutes or until this has all broken down into a thick sauce. Puree this if you want.

In a separate frypan, lightly fry chilli, garlic and cummin seeds in the oil/butter just until the garlic begins to golden.

Add this fried mix, the rest of the garam masala, ginger, haloumi and cottage cheese to the spinach sauce and stir through.

Salt to taste.

That's it!

Serves 2 on rice.

Easy. Versatile. Filling. Thrifty.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic on canvas. If you are already familiar with this dish you will recognise the telltale hoisin and mayo pattern. The rest of the painting is inspired by a Melbourne artist Rosetta Santucci. I love how she uses white overlaid paint. In this case it outlines the pancakes.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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The meatless meals recipe

Okonomiyaki. It's a Japanese street food. Some call it a pizza, some call it a pancake. Personally I lean towards the pancake idea, as they are a batter with fillings not toppings and I just can't imagine these with cheese. But the name of this food basically means what you like, grilled. So if you want to add cheese, then go for it! Okonomi means what or as you like, and yaki means grilled or barbequed. I used to eat these a lot as a student. They can be really filling.

1/2 cup plain flour
1 egg
2 teaspoons soy sauce
4 tablespoons mirin (sweet rice wine vinegar) or sherry or stock, but mirin or sherry are best

Vegetable filling 1 (all veges go into the batter):
1 1/2 cups fine shredded cabbage
1/2 carrot cut into fine sticks
and choose one of the following:
    2 sticks celery, chopped fine
    4 shallots cut down the centre and then into 5-10cm pieces
    10cm zucchini cut into fine strips

Vegetable filling 2 (the cabbage goes into the batter while the rest go on top):
2 cups fine shredded cabbage
an extra egg
extras of choice such as tempeh strips

mayonnaise or salad creme
Hoisin sauce or soy sauce
seaweed flakes (optional)

Mix flour, egg, soy sauce and mirin together to make a batter.

Chop all the veges and mix into the batter.  Don't try saving time by throwing everything in a bowl and mixing.  The results are dodgy.  Mix the batter first, then add the veges.  And be sensible and don't add more veges than the batter can hold.  You want a pancake, not separate batter covered vegetable pieces.
Divide into two and cook in a frypan just like a pancake.  Use a lightly oiled pan on medium heat. Do not squash this so it remains light and fluffy.
If you are making option 2, crack the extra egg on top of the first cooked side and drop your extras of choice on top. Flip this again to cook the egg and extras when the underside is done. 

Serve brushed with Hoisin sauce, criss-crossed with mayonnaise and sprinkled with seaweed flakes.

This makes a light meal for 2.

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More vegetarian cookbook goodies

Need help with conversions? Download this handy dandy pdf of cooking conversion charts for every cooking measuring system I could find. It should make your life easier.

Want to check out more vegetarian dinner recipes? They're all in the Table of Contents.

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