First, because this is a post for the wonderful Kosher Cooking Carnival, two watercolors:
Recently I posted about the health values of garlic. One quality of garlic is if you cook it, it loses much of its pungency and instead becomes sweet. I learned this recipe while standing online at our local Glatt 27(it is called 27 because it is on Rte. 27). The woman in front of me told me she makes this every Friday afternoon. Her kids like it so much they peel all the cloves. No such luck with my children; Eldest Son just looked over my shoulder at this post and called it evil.
Ingredients:
- One bulb of garlic, peeled
- Dried oregano (you could also use parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme or basil)
- Touch of salt to taste
- Broth or water
You need a little baking dish for this recipe. Here’s mine:
First, peel the whole bulb of garlic and put all the cloves in your baking dish. Cover with water (the woman on line uses chicken broth from her soup). Sprinkle with oregano and salt. Bake covered in the oven for about thirty minutes at 350° and mash with a fork. You can serve it in its baking dish.
I don’t like reheating it; it loses too much flavor. Serve as a spread for challah, matzah or crackers. Enjoy!
See photo of baked garlic spread
See larger version of garlic watercolors
Bonus question: which watercolor did I do first?
An experimental painting: I like the energy, the colors, the spontaneity. However, it didn’t achieve the realism I wanted, so I am currently working on a more sedate version. Maybe later, if I succeed with my current painting, I will combine the energetic style with the realism in a third painting.
What do you see?
From sad portraits of Jews to intricate mosaics, Ilana Shafir has created many works of art. I had the pleasure of attending a Highland Park Arts Commission lecture Thursday night (thanks, Jill, for getting me out of the house) where Ilana spoke to a full audience.
Ilana was born in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. She always wanted to study art formally, but as a teenager there was no opportunity. Then the Nazis invaded. Her family managed to escape to a little village called Kula, where she drew portraits of the villagers. When asked how she managed to get art supplies during the war, she replied: “It was a miracle.” After the war, she studied at the Art Academy of Zagreb. In 1949 she made Aliyah (moved to Israel). She settled in Ashkelon, where she still lives today, with a garden full of her mosaics and her whimsical ceramic creatures.
In order to find models for her portraits in her early days in Israel, she went to the local “ma’abara” (transit camp) and created sketches, paintings and prints of the exotic (to her European eyes) residents from Yemen, North Africa, and other areas of the world where Jews had left to come to Israel. I was disappointed that these lovely portraits as well as earlier ones from her European days, which she showed us in her slide show, are not on her website.
At some point someone said to her: “Who is going to hang portraits of sad Jews in their museum?” Around the same time she developed an allergy to turpentine. At first she wore gloves, but this was not enough. She told us a funny aside, that on Purim, when the kids dressed up as artists in Ashkelon, they wore gloves!
Her art style switched to fantastic ink and watercolor paintings, ceramic creatures, and finally, the medium she loves the most, mosaic. She told us it takes 6-7 months for her to complete a mosaic. Talk about stamina and drive.
If you are in Ashkelon, her mosaics are on display in various public places, including a syngagogue, where her mosaic of Jerusalem has the names of family members who perished in the Holocaust and a “Z”, standing for the star Jews had to wear in Sarajevo during the war. Other Jewish themes are the Burning Bush (shown under her photo on this post) and the Tree of Life (with one tree on top of another, each generation has its roots in the former generation, she explained).
The presentation was an introduction by her daughter, a talk by Ilana with slide show, and a short movie by her son, Giora. Learn more: http://www.shafirart.com/
Exhibit in Tsfat: Holocaust Yellow Badge in Art
(click on the Picasa link to see a slide show of the art)
I found this link on the latest Haveil Havalim # 164 – no names edition.
Menachem Wecker just posted an interview we did over email on his blog, Iconia. I really enjoyed answering his questions; the connection between Judaism and art for me brings up many issues, struggles, joys.
This is the only finished artwork I have of one of my children that was done completely from real life. It is considered preferable to paint or draw from a real subject, as opposed to using a photograph. But how does one get a child to sit still, even for five minutes? This son in particular was an extremely busy four-year-old, the age he was when I did this drawing. So I captured him asleep. And as one of his teachers reminded me recently, he still has a hard time sitting still.
I did this painting about two years ago. The subject is havdalah, the ceremony after the end of Shabbat that we do every week. After saying the havdalah prayer, my husband pours a little wine (or grape juice) unto a plate, and I put the candle in the liquid to extinguish the flame. Can spot the two little cloves, symbolic of the besamim (spices) that we smell so we should have a good week? (Shavua tov = good week)
The havdalah in oils painting has a Rembrandtesque quality that I love.
I tend to be fond of blogs with visual content. Not surprising, as I am an artist. So here’s where I’ve been recently:
- Batya posted scenes of spring last week. It is fun to compare spring in one part of the world to the other; at first I mistook her grape vine shot for forsythia, but now that I can compare the two photos I see that grape vines are much woodier.
- Poor Batya! It seems that her monitor is broken, as she again reported here. Do you think she can find one in this office of monitors? Meanwhile, Pesky Settler starting naming her photos, and my favorite is the fig.
- I’ve been noticing that A Simple Jew has simply great visual taste. Take a look at this landscape painting, by Rhode Axel who I think is really Meir Alexlrod(1902-1970), a Russian artist who may have never even seen the subject of the painting, namely the Golan. Note the use of cool, distancing blue in the background against the complementary warm fiery orange in the foreground. Another interesting visual choice by A Simple Jew: a bearded father reads a great big book, presumably a gemarah, while the little boy in a cap plays the violin. Contrast it with the subject matter of the post; in the drawing, it is the boy who yearns for the father’s attention. In the post, Chabakuk Elisha asks how can we get kids attracted to Yiddishkeit.
- Finally, I posted a comment to this post on Iconia, and I got an email back asking me about my artwork in connection to religion. Like my four cups or candles. Stay tuned for more at a later point…
You have two choices. You can either clean or paint. Which would you pick? This past Sunday I did a little of both. I got the painting finished, and my freezer is almost all cleaned.
Here was the creative process:
- Come up with an idea. It’s time for the latest KCC, a blog carnival overseen by this creative cook, and I want to submit my sponge cake recipe. But whenever I submit a recipe, I photograph it. I only make sponge cake on Passover. Who has the patience to separate all those eggs the rest of the year? So I decided it would be easier to paint a sponge cake (this is how my mind works).
- Fine tune the idea and find a method. I email Jill: how do I do that salting watercolor technique again? We end up with a lovely post and include a painting by Jill sort of like a Van Gogh, that I call “Salty Night.”
- Make some sketches.
This was my first sketch:
My husband said it looked like a cake. But on the other hand, he said, one might mistake it for a hat. Sort of like the famous drawing by the narrator of the Little Prince, I said.
- Second sketch: I go to Google image and look up sponge cake. I’m inspired to draw this sketch:
Can’t mistake this one for a hat. The cake plate helps, too.
- Set up my space: I print Jill’s email with the salting watercolor directions, tape the watercolor paper unto a piece of masonite, and draw a final sketch. I purposely placed the subject matter slightly to the left, instead of in the center, to increase interest. Note in this photo how I put in arrow to show the direction of light. I later erased the arrow.
- Wet the area. One usually starts a watercolor by wetting the area that you want to paint.
- Apply the salt and paint. And I painted. I made one side a little darker. I added bits of alizarin crimson to my shadows, for fun. My son says it looks like mabul cake (you have to know both English and Hebrew to get this joke: mabul means flood and sometimes I make mabul cake for Parshat Noach, you know, the one with the flood). My husband says it looks like pound cake. OK, I’ll take that.
- Review the painting. Did the salt technique work? I brought it over to Jill this morning. We agree that the painting worked over all, but the salting works better with: 1) more paint 2) darker colors 3) larger area.
Stay tuned for my sponge cake recipe. Coming soon. At least, before April 7.
Jill teaches art in Highland Park. Stay tuned for Leora’s attempt at a “salty” painting.
Salting is a fun technique for adding texture to your watercolor painting. It works by absorbing water and pushing away the pigment around each grain of salt. You just use regular table salt, but the larger grain Kosher salt can offer you further texture possibilities.
Salting works best on darker and fully saturated color. You lay down paint on the area, then throw salt where you want the effect while it’s still wet. Working quickly is of the essence, so have all your paints and tools ready to go. The secret is too not over do it with the amount of salt. If you put on too much you won’t see where the individual grains have absorbed the water and pushed away the color around it.
It looks particularly nice for representing snow or ocean spray in a seascape, but also just a good general textural device. You can experiment with larger amounts of salt just to built various textures. Fun stuff.
Enjoy, and I’ll post more techniques soon.
Art Teacher Jill
