Satisfying. Thrifty. Easy. Homely.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on canvas. Imagine a typical English grey day. You've been walking outside in the mist. It's cold. Everything in sight is a shade of twilight grey. The house is in sight, with a welcoming glow. You're half frozen, all your clothes are damp and you're starving. Now imagine the cosy warm feeling of homely comfort food. Perhaps bangers and mash? A huge helping of fluffy buttery mashed potatoes, some sausages and your favourite sides, all smothered in gravy. Heavenly.

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

All the alkyd mediums compared

This post is for the oil painters.
Rather than wasting a lot of time working through one different jar of medium at a time to figure out which ones I might like or hate working with, I decided to be all organised anal, buy every one I could get hold of and compare the lot at once.

All these alkyd medium were tested on the same scrap of acrylic primed canvas at the same time. You can see the results altogether in the above photo. If you click on it you'll get a much larger version. The ambient temperature was around 16C, with no humidity to speak of. No paint was included, this is just the medium itself brushed on. The samples were left indoors in my studio, in the open but not in direct sunlight. I was wanting to know how fast these fast drying additives really are, how glossy or otherwise they may be, how thick or thin they are to work with and how much of a colour cast they have.

The price breakdown is partly for my memory, partly for your international curiosity and partly to remind my fellow artists to do material costing breakdowns for the health of your business if you don't already! Many of these mediums are available in larger quantities which works out far cheaper, per millilitre. This is their worst case scenario.

The testing was limited to the mediums I managed to obtain. For instance, would you believe there is only one Gamblin supplier in this entire country? Here in Australia, Art Spectrum (an Australian brand) and Windsor & Newton are available everywhere. Everything else requires a bit of hunting.

I am more than happy to add mediums to this list if you have personally tested them. I am well aware that this is but a small sample of what's out there.

And remember to check out my artworks on Flickr, and have an insider peek at my life as an artist on Facebook. 

Wine, food and painting go together rather well, even if I am a little biased. The Barossa Fine Art Exhibition is part of The Barossa Vintage Festival 2011. It is a painting competition/prize based in the famous Barossa valley wine region in South Australia.

The competition powers-that-be have a stated interest in the 'diversity of contemporary abstracts'. As you know, I have a tendency toward creating abstract paintings and I'm hoping one of my foodie inspired abstracts might be a better-than-crapshoot chance in this competition and catch the eye of the judges from this food and wine region. But which painting?

This is where you can help. I have a hunch which one to send in, but as this whole idea of entering art competitions is new to me, I would love some external opinions. Maybe you and the judges will agree!

So bearing in mind that there will be no information other than the title and artist name to accompany the painting (just like in the poll below), which of these works best captures the spirit of its title?

Two clicks. One on your vote, one to submit your choice. That's it! Along with a heartfelt thank you :)
I'll let you know which one ends up flying my flag.

Tangy. Moreish. Thrifty. Easy.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on linen. Hot and sour soup is all about achieving a balance of these two flavours. This piece is also all about the concept of balance, of getting multiple variables just right for your individual taste. A hair or balance spring represents this idea and I'm sure that you can figure out what the lemon and fire denote.

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

Hot and sour soup is a staple on Chinese restaurant menus around here and I love it. However, it is not very filling, being little more than a tasty broth. For a hungry person this is bad. Apparently it is often flavoured with blood. For a vegetarian or anyone squeamish this is super bad. Due to both of these issues I devised, long ago in my student days, this cheap, quick, filling and animal friendly version that I could make at home in a gigantic pot and live on for days. I hope you like it as much as I do.

6 cups water

a coriander plant (at least 15g including leaves, stalks and clean roots)

3cm / 10g fresh ginger, sliced

2 teaspoons salt

1 carrot, chopped or sliced

8 closed cup button mushrooms, halved or quartered
about 180g tofu, cubed
2 teaspoons fresh grated ginger
1 tablespoon cornflour
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons sesame oil
about 230g bamboo shoots
approx 125g dry asian noodles
3 spring onions, chopped
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar, to taste
1 1/2 teaspoons white pepper powder, to taste

Put the water, coriander, salt, carrot and ginger slices in a large pot and simmer, lid on, for 20 minutes.
Remove ginger and coriander roots.
Add mushroom, tofu, bamboo shoots, grated ginger and simmer until mushrooms are cooked.
Add your choice of noodles and keep simmering until these are cooked.
In a mug or similar, mix cornflour, soy sauce and sesame oil until all the lumps are gone.
Add this to the soup. Stir until it thickens.
Add spring onions.
Add the pepper and vinegar a little at a time, until the dish suits your taste. I recommend adding the vinegar first until it is pleasantly sour, and then adding the pepper until the heat is right for you.


This feeds 3.

Tangy. Unusual. Hearty. Easy.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on linen. Persian fairy tales are wonderful. Actually, that's probably true of most fairy tales. I digress. How captivating is a giant benevolent peacock so old that it knows the knowledge of all the Ages, which purifies the land and waters and acts as mediator and messenger between the earth and sky? It gets better. This Simurgh roosts in Saena, "the Tree of Life, which stands in the middle of the world sea Vourukhasa. The plant is potent medicine, is called all-healing, and the seeds of all plants are deposited on it. When the Simurgh takes flight, the leaves of the Tree of Life shake making all the seeds of every plant fall out. These seeds floated around the world on the winds of Vayu-Vata and the rains of Tishtrya, in cosmology taking root to become every type of plant that ever lived, and curing all the illnesses of mankind." (From Wikipedia) Just wow.

So this painting is inspired by this magical Persian take on cosmology. In this version, all the greenery of this recipe is visible on the Tree of Life and the overall style is strongly influenced by the Persian folk art of this creation myth.

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

OMG a winter stew that I actually like! In creating and testing recipes for winter I discovered that I'm really really truly not a fan of stew. I think I find an entire bowl of sloppy winter vegetables just a bit boring. Which come to think of it is rather odd as I LOVE thick chunky soups. Go figure. Anyway, where I was heading is that I tried stews from cultures all over the world. From the many that were translated into vege versions, this is the only one which made me sit up and go 'wow, that worked'. With all the flavour from the truckload of herbs in this dish, it is anything but dull.

3 tablespoons oil

1 large onion, diced

1 teaspoon turmeric

750g potatoes, in bite size cubes

Greens:

2 cups finely chopped fresh spinach or similar

1 cup finely chopped spring onion, all parts

1/2 cup finely chopped fresh parsley - leaves and small stalks (did you know that the stalks hold the flavour in parsley?)

1/4 cup finely chopped coriander

1 tablespoon dried fenugreek leaves

1/4 cup finely chopped fresh chives

juice of 3 limes

1 teaspoon cinnamon powder

2 cups stock

240g cooked kidney beans

Saute the onion in the oil in a very big pot until a deep golden colour.

Add turmeric and fry for a minute or two.

Add potato and mix well. 

Fry until potatoes are browned.

Add greens and fry, stirring, until greens deepen in colour and darken.

Add stock, kidney beans, lime juice and cinnamon. 

Simmer, covered, for 30 mins or until potatoes are well cooked.
Do. Not. Boil.

Check seasoning for salt, pepper and lime juice.

Serves 3. Yes that's an odd quantity.