Creativity

With 53 days, more or less, to go, I thought I'd post on some of the creative things I've been up to in my umpteen hours of spare time. One of my major activities this week was baking:

Homemade cereal flakes - my usual yellow corn and blue corn batches, with a buckwheat batch as my third (the latter being amazingly sticky - no wonder they say buckwheat pancakes stick to your insides!).

Above are two pictures (with and without the flash) of the nutty shortbread cookies I made as well. You might notice that there's a color theme... that's right, everything is brown! This is because I decided to try swapping out all my sugar for blackstrap molasses. I would say the results were pretty good. While you can definitely taste the molasses, I think the heavy flavor rap molasses gets is just because of the over-spicing of "molasses cookies". These all turned out quite tasty.

My casserole creation: Sweet Potato Chicken Apple Casserole!

The layers are (from bottom to top): pie crust, pre-cooked black rice, sweet potato/egg/broccoli bits, chicken, a sprinkling of more black rice, diced apple, country herbs, slivered almonds. I think that's everything.

And in the bowl... ok, I little messy, and I definitely have to work on my food photography skills, but isn't the color amazing!?

The casserole came as an idea from Jack, who informed me upon leaving last week that I had to use up the black rice, and not to forget about those sweet potatoes in my cupboard, and that I had the beginnings of a good casserole there... so I thought about it for a few days and thus this creation was born. It actually turned out pretty tasty, and I daresay I may make it again. The only thing I think I may leave out is the broccoli - too strong a flavor for the dish (I only added it because it was getting flimsy in my fridge); and the only thing I would add is cheese - I cut up some chunks of Manchego in my first serving and felt like it was a great rounding out of the flavors.

There's also been plenty of time for creating art in the more traditional sense. Aside from other various projects, I've got a couple paintings that I recently completed:

I painted this large piece (12" by 18" or so) for my friend Daisy in Texas. She was complaining that the white walls of her apartment that she's currently living in were too bare, so I promised her some art to help brighten things up a bit. She loved it, and sent me a photo of it on the wall by her bed - apparently it's the last thing she sees before going to bed each night. What an honor! :)

I painted the above painting this week. It was inspired by the slough (at least, I think that's what it is) along the highway between Arcata and Eureka. The real body of water is much wider, but I wanted to capture the invasive eucalyptus trees that surround everything, so think of this as a wide-angle shot squished into a short frame. In case you're wondering, the biggest, closest bird is supposed to be a heron of some sort. I was just going to do a grey winter sky for the backdrop, but at the last second I decided I wanted a sunset instead, and I think it really brought the painting to life color-wise.

So that's what I've been working on lately. But before I sign off, I wanted to share a few other paintings that I did in January before I came up here.

 

Call it unfinished or art nouveau or whatever. I meant to put a firewood salesman in the painting, but I couldn't decide where I wanted him. This is based on a scene that struck me while we were driving around in the high desert.

I think this is quite possibly the only portrait oriented painting I've done so far. The idea came to me randomly, and I played around with it a bit before sketching (which I rarely do) and then painting and salting the background, and finally working on the three foreground sections of this piece. The sheer look of the skirt happened quite by accident when I tried to make it look more woven and the paint was too wet. The shoes are my favorite (though I'm not 100% satisfied with their shape) because the color is an insanely dark midnight blue. It was a simple painting, but very beautiful and elegant and I'm very proud of it.

This one was an experiment in layered painting - something Jack tends to do when he paints. Obviously I wasn't quite fully committed to it, but I like how it turned out. First there's the background - swirly designs in various purple hues; second is the middle ground which was yellows and reds mixed on the page with my hake brush going swish swish over them; third was the cat, in a watered-down shade of dark indigo combined from the skirt and shoes above. I think he would've looked better if I had used more paint and less water, a problem I have quite frequently.

Well, I hope you enjoyed looking at my creations - and maybe they've inspired you to create something yourself! Any comments or tips or whatnot on the artwork is always appreciated as I'm still very much in the learning stages with my watercolors (and probably will consider myself to be so for many, many years to come).

Until next time!