"Remember the time I made this for you?" I asked Jeff as he licked the spatula. This was unfair of me. How can anyone be expected to remember the taste of a baked good he had eaten four and a half years ago, based on the raw batter alone?
Jeff had no idea.
"I had known you for twelve days. On the morning of January 3 [first day back at school after winter break, a.k.a. the most depressing day of the year--K], my car wouldn't start and needed lots of repairs. You volunteered to drive me to and from work for as long as it took, and to say thank you I made you coconut bread."
Jeff didn't remember that either. He also didn't remember it after tasting the finished product.
OH WELL!
I guess it's that kind of baked good. But I'm telling you, he loved my coconut bread then, and he loved it when I made it again this week. Please note the torn-into nature of the top photo: this is clear evidence of greed. Why the long gap between loaf 1 and loaf 2? I don't know. It's near the front of a cookbook I keep around for a handful of stellar recipes, but it's older and I don't browse through it all that much. Tyler Florence's Real Kitchen, I guess you're that kind of cookbook.
Easy stuff, people. Mix dry things into wet things, pour into loaf pan, bake. And when you bake it, you'll see deep valleys form in its crust, and you will think to yourself, Why yes: I certainly am an accomplished baker. And the loaf is dense--a little goes a long way. We ate about half of it over the course of a couple of days, and then I cut the rest into manageable chunks and froze it.
Tyler Florence recommends that you top this with pineapple butter (8 oz can of drained, crushed pineapple plus two sticks of soft butter), and that's such a Tyler thing to do, isn't it? We didn't have enough butter, and anyway, we don't want to clog our arteries any--well, much--further. We did top it with T.F.'s peach and rosemary spoon fruit from the same book. I'll probably blog about that next.
INGREDIENTS
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted, plus more for greasing the pan
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup brown sugar, packed
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Zest of 1 lemon, finely grated <--I kind of prefer this without the zest, but give it a try if you enjoy lemon in everything
1 1/2 cups unsweetened coconut milk <--Light coconut milk is fine
1 1/2 cups shredded coconut, toasted <--I was lazy and didn't bother toasting it. In fact, I have never toasted it for this recipe. But go for it if you're feeling ambitious and want to impress that adorable man who's driving you to and from work everyday. I'm just saying that he will still ask you to marry him even if it's not toasted.
DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 375°F.
Grease the bottom and sides of a 9×5-inch loaf pan with butter. In a large bowl, mix the flour with the baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.
In another large bowl, whisk together the melted butter with the brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, and lemon zest. Pour in the coconut milk and whisk together.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and fold everything together with a spatula until you have a smooth batter. Gently fold in the shredded coconut until evenly distributed. Pour into the prepared loaf pan and set it on a cookie sheet. Bake for 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick comes out clean when inserted into the center of the bread. Rotate the pan periodically to ensure even browning.
Note from K: I always take this out at around 50-55 minutes because it totally smells and looks done to me, but the center-top comes out a little raw. But I don't really mind that. We like slightly underbaked goods in this house.
Cool the bread in the pan for 20 minutes or so; then when cool enough to handle, remove the coconut bread to a cutting board and let it cool completely before slicing.
PS: It's good toasted and good with powdered sugar on top!
This is where I went to elementary school and junior high between 1974-1983. My classmates and I were bused to a middle-ish school in a neighboring town during fourth and fifth grade, but I spent the bulk of my childhood here at La Harpe Elementary. My parents and siblings went to school here, too, as did most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and possibly even grandparents. My dad taught P.E., coached, and and was principal here for decades.
And it's going to be demolished soon.
My cousin Tyler took the photo above, and as I write this he is attempting to receive permission to show his photos of its now-damaged interior. [Edit: he got permission! I'll share more of his work as the photos arrive; two are below.] The idea that this building will not be around anymore triggered a wave of nostaglia that woke me up this morning. As I mentally walked from classroom to classroom, dozens of memories and "firsts" piled up, and I think I'm going to drive myself crazy unless I write some of them down in a series of disjointed paragraphs. I apologize if you've read any of these anecdotes before. I just wanted to see them all in one place.
Kindergarten
We had to fill out worksheets according to instructions played on a tape recorder. These were called "Listening Lessons." One of the items was a pig that we were told to color pink. Knowing that pigs were more of a peach color, I colored it peach and was deducted points. I have been a realist since the day I was born, damn it!
Across the hall was a girls' bathroom with four or five stalls. A rumor circulated among the girls: if the seat was up, that meant a boy had used it, and we should avoid it because, yuck, boys. Much later I realized that the seat was up because it had been recently cleaned by the janitors.
(I'm in the back row, far right, next to teacher aide Mrs. Yetter, blinded by the sun)
The class made a cookbook where each of us described how to make our favorite meal and were quoted verbatim in a dittoed booklet. My recipe was for spaghetti with meat sauce. I remember being interviewed for this like it was yesterday.
Kelly: Brown the hamburger...
Mrs. Y.: How much?
Kelly: The whole thing.
And so on.
First grade
I learned how to read! Our teacher Mrs. Strand must have taught us by osmosis, as I don't remember much about the process, but I do know that a whole lot of flashcards were involved. A small group of us were seated around her, and the intimidatingly big word "something" came up. None of the other kids knew what it was...but I did, and I thought to myself, I really know how to read now.
I was shy and always waited for other kids to ask me to play, except kids don't do that. They just start playing and do not issue engraved invitations. Lonely and frustrated one day, I sat on the bleachers and cried. A sweet girl named Sara (front row, green dress) sat beside me and said she would be my friend.
Teenagers fascinated many of us, and we were able to observe the high school kids during lunch in the cafeteria. We idolized the ones we recognized from swing choir, who were every bit as good as the people on the radio and were basically superstars already, and the cheerleaders when they wore their purple and gold uniforms to school. We went bananas for Judy Bradley, this blonde, sunny creature with feathered hair and a great big smile.
Second grade
I read a story called "Great Day In Ghana" and came to understand that the world was larger than I could ever imagine, and people lived in places that were vastly different from all-white, small town Illinois.
One time Mrs. Eckhardt used my name in a sentence during a spelling test. "Blue. Kelly is wearing a blue turtleneck." It has stayed with me forever and will most likely be my dying thought.
Jimmy Blue (back row, orange shirt) wrote a poem about spring that was better than mine. Then he moved away, tragically, and I decided to focus on writing poems.
Reva (front row, aqua shirt) and I decided that if we had to get married someday, we would marry each other, because yuck, boys.
Third grade
We were the favorite class of teachers. One time I overheard an exhausted-sounding Mrs. Eckhardt talking to our third grade teachers about us. "Enjoy them!" she concluded.
Mrs. Wernecke forced us to listen to tape recordings of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson every day after lunch. During this time I drew microscopic comics on folded-over, 2"x1" pieces of paper for the amusement of Sara and Michele (back row, red dress, standing by me).
Mrs. Wernecke was a tough customer who also forced us to say, "May I go to the lavatory?" None of us had ever heard of a lavatory before, and many simply called it "the laboratory."
My poetry had improved to the point that Mrs. Wernecke created handmade blank books for me. I wrote my poems inside and illustrated them, and that was terrific. But then she wanted me to read them aloud to my class and the other third grade section, and any hope I may have had of being popular flew right out the window (second floor, west side).
During an open house my art teacher, the mysterious and very old Mr. Soule, told my parents that "this one is special."
By the time my class entered fourth grade, our teacher Mrs. Smith (at our building in Terre Haute, which is pronounced, appallingly, as "terry hut") was amazed at the amount of math catch-up she had to do with us. And that was kind of understandable, what with all the nonstop poetry going on in the lower grades.
Two years later we returned to the elementary building in La Harpe for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade.
Sixth grade
Study hall, late September, Mr. Doyle's room (social studies): I was reading/devouring a Judy Blume book and paused to look out the open third floor windows. Golden afternoon light bathed the trees across the way, and out on Main Street a car drove by, blasting Late in the Evening by Paul Simon. And I felt so content, sitting there, reading my book, loving that song and feeling somehow older.
Dad was my P.E. teacher and coach, and he spent a lot of extra time at school after hours. Sometimes I sat at his office desk drawing cartoons, or my brother and I goofed around in the gym. I distinctly remember trying to figure out how to serve a volleyball on the day after John Lennon died, sadly thinking about his then-current song (Just Like) Starting Over.
It was a bad year for assassinations, and later that spring attempts were made on the lives of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul. We watched TV coverage of both in our school's big study hall, and to help us cope with the violence we were instructed to write a poem (of course) called Assassination. We had to take the letters of assassination and make each one begin a new line. This was an excercise in futility because (1) the word contains a ridiculous number of repeated letters, and (2) the word contains a ridiculous number of repeated ass-es.
Seventh grade
Dad is basically synonymous with La Harpe Elementary. The number of times he carried televisions up and down those stairs and the number of times he put Vom-Sorb on messes when janitors could not be found would boggle the mind. To be in the school with Dad as he closed the place down at night after a late ball game was always discombobulating. The cavernous black hallways creaked with scary "building settling" noises that I relive in nightmares to this day. And yet I always felt fortunate to be there at night, like I was seeing a secret side to the school that most kids never saw.
Mrs. Logan, our reading teacher for sixth and seventh grade, seemed like--heck, was and is--a perfect human being. She was kind, thoughtful, interesting, and generous. Her easy smile lit up the room, and she selected books for us that were exactly the right books. Mrs. Jones was like a dear aunt who taught us grammar via a series of handwritten dittos that I adored. She encouraged me as a writer and praised my "dry" sense of humor. She died nearly twenty years ago, and I still think about her all the time. Her room is on the left side of the hallway (photo by Tyler).
Eighth grade
I won the school spelling bee in the study hall, memorized the countries in the Middle East, was intimidated by algebra, touched a computer for the first time (a Radio Shack TRS-80)...
...read dozens of books from our library (including an account of the Salem witch trials that freaked me out for days), and was misinformed about the pronunciation of the word "duodenum" (it's this not doo-oh-DEN-um). My science teacher said it a lot, along with "uhhh." I used to keep a running tally and doodled spectacularly to stay alert. I experienced my first migraine headache and accompanying wave of nausea while taking an English test--luckily no Vom-Sorb was involved.
Our particular arrangement of teachers and sports-related activities created a pressure-cooker. I was obsessed with learning new things, even the dull stuff, and did at least two hours of homework each night. With a handful of exceptions, my relationships with my peers had become a bit shallow or competitive. Most students were friendly in a "hey how's it going" kind of way. But during my years at the top floor of this building, I could feel myself separating from the rest of the group, who most likely didn't care about the pronunciation of "duodenum" and probably weren't even listening in the first place. My differences didn't matter as much to me as they used to, and the twenty-one girls and seven boys who were born in 1969 along with me started to seem more like a group of random kids rather than the most important people in the world. I still longed for the kinds of friends I would eventually find later in life, but in the meantime I wasn't going to sit on the bleachers and cry about it. My thirst for knowledge was that voracious and overriding, and this evolution began at La Harpe Elementary.
---
To augment his teacher's salary, Dad spent many of his summers painting the walls, ceilings, and sometimes floors of our school, and he let me help him. He did the roller work, and I took care of the edges. We listened to the radio and worked happily in the old, hot building. Not content to simply paint a room beige, Dad figured out how to create snappy racing stripes in a variety of bright colors and patterns, making each room unique. Our work is buried under thirty years' worth of additional paint [Edit: no it is not! We painted those stripes up there!], but that summer job made me feel intimately connected with my school, and I'm sure Dad feels the same way.
La Harpe Elementary is a structure much like hundreds of other Illinois schools built during that period in a style that did not set the architectural world on fire. Vandalism and decay have set in after its doors closed for good three years ago. But like thousands of other former students who spent their sometimes-happy, sometimes-sad formative years there, I can't help but shed a tear knowing that part of my childhood will soon vanish.
How many people out there have blogs? One, two, three...okay, ten. Well, let me ask you this: do your search stats scare you? Because every week I receive an email from Ligit, the company responsible for my search box on the right, and it tells me how people find my blog and what they look for once they're here. Most of the time I can't bring myself to read it because, let's face it, weirdos live on the Internet. While I enjoy writing and having a blog, the idea that weirdos (and non-weirdos) are finding it and searching it...man, I'd kind of rather not know about that.
One Ligit feature I'm not nuts about is the word cloud, or whatever you call it, that evolves when people do a search. Whenever you type in something like ice cream or murderer, those words pop up in the cloud. Other readers come along later and look at the cloud, see something juicy like murderer, and they click on it. Everytime they click it, it gets bigger. Every once in a while, I'll check that sidebar and be somewhat alarmed to find
MURDERER
a few inches below my photo.
(No one has searched for murderer. Yet.)
So in an attempt to help out people who are searching for information related to this blog, I'm presenting my second list of popular searches, along with explanations and/or advice. I did the first one, which you can read to find out about tampons, cookies, and my personal favorite, infertility, about a year ago.
Ugh, maybe this will have to become an annual thing...?
1. How Jeff and I met.
I've covered this several times already, but in case you're new to the blog and don't want to sift through the old stuff, we met on Match.com about four and a half years ago, fell in love quickly, and were married about six months later. Online dating: it works!
2. Sugar cookies.
The recipe you're looking for is here. I make them for Christmas, various birthdays, Bun's vets, and a couple of little girls. They are daughters of friends and have come to expect them when we stop by. They're a lot of work, make no mistake, but sometimes I'm in the mood for a project like this. Yeah, it's not a recipe. It's a project.
3. Poof/Emily.
Lots of my readers are fans of my sister Emily, whom I've called Poof for over 20 years. She has an incredibly popular YouTube channel where she reviews makeup and demonstrates how to use it. Whenever she mentions me, I get a spike in readers. Yay for the Poof Bump! I write about her all the time, and I hope her viewers find what they're looking for when they search for her here.
4. Louis C.K.
Over the past 24 hours, somebody has been searching multiple times for comedian Louis C.K. here, typing his name as many ways as he or she can, and coming up empty-handed. I'm sure I have mentioned him on at least a few occasions, but Ligit can't seem to find anything. Strange. Well, person who is looking for Louis C.K., I would just like to say that I think Louie is the funniest comedian in the business, and I am in awe of him. I love his show on FX and am on his mailing list. I gleefully purchase everything he puts out there. One day after I had a breastcancer biopsy, I watched his comedy specials, and he turned my existential terror appointment* frown upside-down. Maybe that's why I'm such a big fan.
* "Existential terror appointment" is an expression coined by my pal Melinda. She, like Louie, has red hair and is one of the funniest people walking the planet.
5. Weight diet.
Do you want to know my weight? Sorry, that ain't nobody's business but my own. The dress I'm wearing today is a size M, which suggests that I am a medium-sized woman, in case that helps.
6. Buttermilk.
Sure! I like buttermilk and get excited when it's an ingredient in a recipe. I don't really understand buttermilk, so it makes that recipe seem experimental. Everything I've put buttermilk in has turned outgreat, for what it's worth.
7. Altessa.
I have no idea what this is and have never written about it. Here is a picture I found while searching for Altessa on Google. It is a neighborhood in Las Vegas with tiny trees. 'Sup, Altessa?
8. Alissa Joie.
I'm clueless regarding this search as well, but here is a kinda-close image search result. Are you searching for Angelina Jolie, reader? If so, your spelling is atrocious. Angelina Jolie is a glamorous movie star with many children. I hope this helps.
9. True Blood.
Sorry, but I don't watch this show. I have no reason for this, other than the fact that I don't have HBO, am not into 21st Century vampires, and watch too many other shows already.
10. Various misspelled food items.
Hungry people who can't spell, please click on your misspelled item of choice below. It will take you to the recipe/item I think you want.
(I've never made a frittata. I don't like the texture around the edges.)
And finally, here's the reason I decided to do another Popular Searches entry.
11. Pregnant.
As with Infertile, my readers clicked on this so many times that it became uncomfortably huge, forcing me to add it to the list of searches I don't want visible in the word cloud. I'm not pregnant, and I don't like the thought of people seeing that giant word next to my face and jumping to conclusions. It also reminds me of something I can't be and have been sad about in the past. I think I did a good job of explaining this here and here and would like to posit the idea that maybe a woman can be valued for things beyond those that come out of her uterus. I kind of like the things that come out of my hand.
Oh wait, there's one more.
12. Ugly ginger boy with blonde highlights.
My painting of little Owen turned up on someone's general Internet image search for the above. It was a number of pages down. I'm guessing that in the blog I wrote about the painting, I used the words highlights, blonde, boy, and possibly ginger somewhere, and that was good enough for Google. I will have you know that Owen is one of the most adorable little boys in the world. I met him a couple of months ago at my opening in Jacksonville. A cousin of Mabel, he's a little bigger now but still in that darling tot phase, and he tackled me with a giant hug. His hair is mesmerizingly red now. He's the kind of beautiful child people openly gape at and way cuter than the mean weirdo searching the Internet for ugly ginger boys.
Let's hear it for jumbo meringues as big as your face! As someone who likes to make, eat, and even paint desserts, I can say that Paris is a wonderland of beautiful sweets, and Jeff and I felt like Hansel and Gretel most of the time.
In an attempt to adjust to Paris time quickly, we resisted the temptation to take a nap (I had been awake for 20+ hours by then) and headed in the general direction of the Eiffel Tower. Jeff's iPhone has an app that helped us navigate the Metro system--all you have to do is type in where you are and where you want to go, and the app tells you what lines to take and where to get off. Highly recommended if you have no sense of direction like me, and a nice backup if you know what's going on, like Jeff.
In case you've never been to Paris, the Metro is an efficient and reliable way to get around once you understand it, and if you enjoy surreptitiously glancing at bored Parisians without being some kind of creep, it's truly the way to go.
The Metro is also a great way to get The Metro by 80s pop group Berlin firmly lodged in your head for days at a time.
Jeff wanted to treat me to a couple of surprises before we did any actual sightseeing. "I think we should get some chocolate first," Jeff said, and have truer words ever been spoken? Does a more agreeable sentence exist in the English language? Soon enough we were gaping at an over-the-top variety of candy from chocolatier Jean-Paul Hevin. The small shop's interior, which looked sort of like this (forgot to take photos due to excitement), displayed the chocolates under glass as if they were precious jewels.
We bought a small grab bag (grab box) of variety chocolates and sat on a bench across the street and shared them, marveling at the unexpected flavor combinations and also loving the old reliables. Again I was too excited and hungry to take any photos, but I believe that blog photos of chocolate are a form of torture to most readers; wouldn't you agree? So here's a picture of the box instead.
Also photographed: my leopard (cheetah?) print gloves, big chunka Navajo turquoise, and red coat. Something about seeing those colors together brings me irrational joy, and when I wasn't surreptiously glancing at Parisians on the Metro, I amused myself by looking at my left wrist.
Chocolate appetizers devoured, Jeff led me to Le Petit Cler, a restaurant he'd researched that used pain Poilâne in its croque monsieur/madame. This was a huge deal to us because according to food writer David Lebovitz, pain Poilâne is "considered the best bread in the world."
The world!
Also we have had a four-year running joke about a dish I fix called croque monsieur bake, and loosely translated "croque monsieur" means "mister crunchy," and I'm sorry but few things are funnier to me. If you'd like to learn more about Mr. Crunchy, and I don't know why you would, please click here.
We sat in Le Petit Cler's very petit dining room (which was doing brisk, late-lunch business) and waited for our Crunchies to arrive, elbow-to-elbow with locals and a number of their children. Sidebar: French children were a revelation to us, and recent articles like this one rang true. Patient, quiet and exceptionally well-behaved as a rule, they made American children seem like entitled little monsters, I'm sorry to say. (And while I am not a parent, I worked in a middle school for years and witnessed firsthand the best and the worst that American children have to offer, believe me.) While in Paris, we saw one child throwing a legitimate fit while outside a toy store. His father consoled him while a sibling recorded the event on his camera--could tantrums be so rare in Paris that they are filmworthy? This outlier aside, we found a kinship with these serious mini Parisians and admired their cuteness.
HEY FOOD.
What you have here is a 4"x10" oval slice of the aforementioned pain Poilâne, its interior soft and complex, its exterior crunchy and slightly smoky, topped with a slice of ham and an exorbitant, indecent amount of Gruyere cheese that had been broiled until bubbly and golden brown, and crowned with an egg. It was one of those dining experiences where the food was so good and we were so tired and hungry that all we could do was gaze across the table at each other, slowly shaking our heads in disbelief.
And then we were off to find an Art Nouveau doorway Jeff's daughter Melissa thought we should see:
The address of this doorway: 29 Avenue Rapp, just a random street. Salvador Dali called this the most erotic facade in Paris, and it includes a bust of designer Jules Lavirott's wife in the center, Adam and Eve, and a giant penis. Oooh, dirty architectural joke, let's try to find it!
Soon we rounded a corner and WHOA EIFFEL TOWER HELLO.
In my previous trip to Paris, I had not visited the tower and was never anywhere particularly close to it, as my companion didn't want to do anything touristy. But honestly, suddently encountering the Eiffel Tower looming like Godzilla in the middle distance was a flat-out thrill, and ladies, I'm sure you know who I felt like.
We walked to the tower, becoming increasingly giddy. It's just so big. I've seen it a million times in books, movies, and on television, but those don't capture the scale of the thing, especially when you're close enough to see the underside of its lower platform. It occurred to me that the Eiffel Tower is like an upside-down tornado, and that idea made me love it ten times more.
Predictably, the closer to the tower we got, the crazier the number of tourists became, and we couldn't bring ourselves to stand in their endless lines. We enjoyed the tower from ground level and were more than content with that.
(The next photos of the tower were taken by Jeff when he was in Paris about a month before he met me.)
It started to rain, so we made our way back home. We pulled out the bed, checked our email, listened to some highly appropriate Lou Reed songs on Jeff's iPhone (it plugged into the apartment's alarm clock), and we fell asleep.
I'm excited to announce that my watercolors will soon be on display in a one-person show at the David Strawn Art Gallery, including this brand new painting called Planets and Foil. (Info about this painting is coming soon, and I know they're not planets.) The gallery is at 331 W. College Ave in Jacksonville, Illinois, which is a small-ish college town located between Springfield and St. Louis.
The show opens on Saturday, March 31 from 6-8 pm. Want to see me give a five-minute mini talk about my work? Be there at 6:30. See the woman on the far left (photo found via Google image search)? That'll be me, and I hope one of those other people will be you.
Apparently a friend of a friend passed my name along to the powers that be at the gallery, and they invited me to display my work. I've never been to the Strawn before, and I couldn't find many photos of the gallery's interior except for the one above, but I do know the building looks like this:
I'm already crazy about this place.
I'll be giving a (sold-out) watercolor workshop at the gallery most of Saturday--similar to the one described here--and the show opens that evening. It will be a long day for me, but hopefully it will also be a lot of fun.
I'm hoping the gallery's regulars will attend the opening, and I know my family and some area friends plan to show up, including such Alizarine superstars as Poof, Jeff, Mom, Dad, Tyler, Terry, Melinda (possibly Kate and Mabel too), along with other fabulous people possibly unbeknownst to you such as Kendra, Zinnia, Chris, Jenny, Rob, Melanie, my young penpal Grace, Jay, TA, Annie, and hopefully many more people to whom I sent postcards. Bun will not be there, but she does star in three paintings, one of which I am working on right now.
And I'd love to see you! Please, if you are in the area and are the least bit curious about my paintings, come to the show. It's free!
You'd better believe we'll have refreshments including unnamed mystery snacks provided by volunteers, soft drinks, and fancy fancy wine. Come for the art, but stay for the snacks and especially the harp music that will be rocking the gallery all night long.
If you can't attend the big opening, my work will still be at the gallery during the month of April (click here for hours).
One of my new paintings, Glass Gems 3, will be at the gallery for the opening, but after that I'll need to take it home. It's been accepted for the Illinois Watercolor Society's national exhibition, which is terrific, but unfortunately there's some overlap with the Strawn show. I will replace the original with a print that will look just like it, thanks to the wonderful printmakers at Imagekind. Please visit Imagekind if you would like to purchase a print of any of my paintings--see this post for details (scroll way down).
Thanks as always for reading my blog, and I hope you can come to my show! (Excuse the bossiness of this banner.)
I'd like to introduce you to my club! Meet Annabelle and Emily, a couple of former students of mine. When I made the decision to end my teaching career and become a full-time artist last year, these two missed me and took the initiative to form an independent art club. I'm calling them co-presidents. Co-queens!
We meet at Cafe Kopi, a local coffee shop, four times a year (at the start of each new season). At our meetings, I give my former students new projects to work on just for fun, and then we sit around talking about our current artistic endeavors and anything else that comes to mind. We also enjoy coffee drinks and homemade snacks. Like most clubs, this one started out kind of big and has since reduced in size to its hardcore, founding members.This little club has touched my heart, and I've enjoyed mentoring Annabelle and Emily.
I have a one-person show coming up at the end of March, and I wanted to add a new, big portrait to my collection, and...I can't remember what made me decide to paint the girls, other than obviously I needed to paint them. They're so beautiful. Annabelle reminds me of Natalie Portman here, and Emily's more like Nicole Kidman coloring-wise, so that contrast was wonderful to play with.
But in the end, this painting is actually a tribute to my favorite movie about teenage alienation, Ghost World. If you don't know what Ghost World is, here you go.
Annabelle is Rebecca, Emily is Enid, and I guess that must make me Seymour.
But back to the painting.
This is the painting after two days. The girls are gazing out a window in the coffee shop. Annabelle has a sort of dreamy expression, and Emily seems a little skeptical, maybe.
A couple of days later, I had started to add their surroundings. Painting portraits can be a little stressful, so I worked on their faces in the morning when I had fresh eyes and the background in the afternoon as fatigue set in.
The cafe has red doorways that were delicious to paint. Cadmium red light is a miracle color. A blurry man who reminds me of Paul Gauguin sits outside at a table beneath an awning decorated with colored lights.
I told Annabelle and Emily to wear something that would be challenging for me to paint, and they did not disappoint! Plaid and floral patterns are no joke but are so worth the time. You can see the beginning stages of Annabelle's buffalo check shirt on her rolled-up sleeve. This was no ordinary watercolor plaid shirt. The colors were such that I had to paint each square individually instead of layering glazes. In other words, it was hard. Emily's shirt would have been easier to paint had the print been bigger. The tiny roses were tedious!
I saved the table for last because I knew it would go quickly. The reflections involved a lot of wet-into-wet sections, and the damp paper did a lot of the work for me.
During my last days of painting, I told Jeff that the background reminded me of "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" by Charles Demuth.
"You think in color," he said. I guess I do!
And I also have a big announcement.
In the past I've offered two of my paintings as giclee prints (Burano Glass and Poppies), which are exact digital copies of my paintings on watercolor paper. I'm excited to announce that I've branched out: now you can buy ALL of my paintings as prints.
Imagekind allows you the freedom to buy prints in a variety of sizes and formats. Maybe you want The Graduates to be iPad-sized. Maybe you want it to be a poster. Maybe you want it framed. Maybe you don't. Maybe you want it on expensive paper. Maybe you want something cheaper. Maybe you even want to see it on a canvas. You can do any of these things! A couple of my friends have purchased my prints from Imagekind, and they report that the process is fast and easy. Imagekind ships internationally, too!
Note: I'm not going to get rich off this venture, but every little bit helps. I'd like you to think of this ol' blog as your Watercolor 'n' Recipe NPR or your Watercolor 'n' Kitty PBS, and baby, this is my pledge drive! Have I given you a recipe that you use all the time now? Have I posted a painting you'd like to see on your wall if the original wasn't so freaking expensive? Would you like to help me buy Bun's high fiber food? Please consider buying one of my prints. You'll get something new you can hang on your wall and you can feed my cat!
Double Note: If you buy a print for $20, please know that I will receive $10. I earn an additional 15% commission on any frames, so if a frame costs $100, I'll receive $15. It takes a while before I'll see the money (to give customers time for returns), and if you buy something I won't automatically know that you did it. So feel free to leave a comment here or talk to me on Twitter (@kellyeddington)!
Triple note: the settings that pop up automatically are the ones I'd personally suggest (Hahnemule Torchon paper is the most like watercolor paper, for example), but you can change them at will. Hate the frame I've selected? Want a different mat? Do what you like!
Quadruple note: the premise to the cartoon below is that the man was making cool donuts shaped like planes.
Mom gave me some old photos when Jeff and I visited at Christmas--boy was that a gift and food bonanza!--and I thought I'd share them here. My folks didn't take lots of photos of my brother and me. We were at our cutest in the 70s and are among the last generation of kids whose every waking moment was not covered with photojournalistic zeal by our parents. Mom's camera was kind of a fossil. Developing photos involved sending rolls of film in special envelopes to some faraway lab and then waiting weeks for the prints to arrive in the mail. It had to have been a pain in the ass for Mom and expensive to boot. The existing photos that do document our childhood have, by virture of their scarcity, become iconic visual aids in our family's folklore.
Case in point: the photo above. This is one of my earliest memories, and I probably remember it because Mom thought it was important enough to photograph. I was given the fun job of putting the cheese on the pizza, and I distinctly remember the pleasure of placing the cheese in the nooks and crannies created by the hamburger. (We were having Poverty Pizza, as I fondly refer to it now, which was made with a Chef Boyardee pizza kit consisting of dough mix, packet of Parm, and a tall skinny can of sauce. Hamburger sold separately.) As you can see, I'm using my left hand even though I'm right-handed. Mom was a lefty, and it looks like she set the bowl on the left because that's just the way a lefty would do it.
More culinary prep work: it's corn shuckin' time. I'm sitting on a stool that remains part of my parents' living room furniture. Note also the corrective shoes I'm wearing. Those were supposed to keep me from pointing my toes in when I walked. While they are not exactly doing anything helpful in this photo, they must have worked because I don't toe-in (as I called it) when I walk now. At least not as much. Also, wagons seemed to be key toys for children to have back then. We always had so many things to pull around!
Here's a sweaty three year-old me and my baby brother Ryan. I had just run into the house after playing outside with my cousins Scott and Jamie, and Ryan was standing up in his playpen. Baby Ryan was stupefyingly cute and happy. How could you not hug him, standing there with his little face? Mom said that people would sometimes say things like, "It's a shame to waste all that beauty on a boy" when they saw him.
My grandparents had Shetland ponies that grazed in the pasture behind our house--how's that for enchanting?--and when I was three, a palomino named Duchess had a colt. You can see the ponies in the background, and I'm about to give them some carrots. I've got to hand it to Mom--that is the perfect outfit for a little girl to be wearing out by the pony barn.
Soon enough, it was time for me to go to school. Can you find me in this class of squinting kindergarteners? I'm on the far right in the back row, wearing a blue and red gingham dress sewn by Mom. I was one of the tallest kids in the class, along with Jimmy, the blonde boy in the orange shirt. I am thoroughly convinced that my life would have been completely different had Jimmy not moved away when we were in second grade. Standing beside me is Michele--we would become co-valedictorians in 13 years. And check out our teacher Mrs. Engle on the left, a.k.a. the most beautiful woman any of us had ever seen.
At Christmas a few months later, my brother and I scored a giant cardboard box that contained some big kitchen appliance. That night Ryan and I hid in the box and popped out at random times, jack in the box-style, screaming with glee, while our toys languished beneath the Christmas tree.
I have some more photos that were taken once Poof arrived on the scene, but I think I'll save them for a future blog. I hope those of you who celebrated Christmas had plenty of time to play in big cardboard boxes with your loved ones.
As I mentioned a couple of years ago, I came into our marriage with zero Christmas swag, and Jeff had several jumbo Tupperware containers full of it. In order to make the Christmas tree more of a 50-50 thing, I created homemade gingerbread cookie ornaments, and I have been doing so ever since. It's an inexpensive way to produce dozens of ornaments, and they smell great, too.
This year we decided to use colored lights instead of our usual white ones, and I am loving it. I was tired of elegance and longed for some whimsy, damn it. Plus the colored lights can add a note of intrigue to an ordinary snowman, see above. When I showed that photo to Jeff, he laughed and proclaimed the snowman "psychotic" and clearly in cahoots with that owl.
"The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most." -- quote by art critic John Ruskin. I included this quote on a color wheel handout that I gave to students every year of my teaching career.
Incredibly random things inspire me. Example: sometimes during episodes of Friday Night Lights, you'll see a character with unfocused colored lights behind him or her, and it's beautiful. I'm thinking Riggins in the season 4 opening credits below.
See? I wanted backgrounds like that in my life.
Have I made my case for colored lights?
This year I strayed from Nigella's tried-and-true recipe in favor of a new one by the usually totally reliable team at Cook's Illustrated. Mistake. The dough was fussy to work with, I ruined two pans because the holes had closed as the cookies cooled (boring story, my fault), and the icing (powdered sugar and milk instead of water) gave the cookies a slight but lasting dampness that caused some of the heavier ones to break when I hung them. Honestly, I think that recipe was more about creating a good-tasting cookie than a durable ornament. I'm not going to write it down because I don't plan to make them again. Nigella's much better recipe is here.
As you can see, I stuck faux jewels and sequins in the icing to produce about fifty delightfully gaudy Christmas geegaws. Since nobody's going to eat them, why not? They're so much more sparkly than standard cookie decorations. This year I hung them with those ornament hooks you can buy for about a penny each, and this was much easier than hand-tying a bunch of loops with fishing line or string.
And that is the story of our Christmas tree (please excuse inclusion of my laptop in the photo). If you can spare an afternoon and want to add a handmade touch to your tree, this is a fun way to go.
In the same vein as my crab apples, here's a 10.5"x13.5" watercolor of some mushrooms I found growing next to a tree stump in our yard. They were hidden under some leaves, which I cleared away just a bit. This revealed all kinds of sticks and other dark plant material that was in the process of becoming our state's beautiful black topsoil. (I've known international students who have been astounded by how black our dirt is here, including one who cutely took photos of it.)
Speaking of students, when I was a high school art teacher, kids always wanted to draw, paint, and sculpt mushrooms. I assumed that most of these kids were druggies and encouraged them to become inspired by, I don't know, one of the trillion other subjects available to them on this planet. "But I don't know what else to draw! And I just really like mushrooms!" I'm sure you do.
Also they're way too easy. Come on.
Gee, what are you going to make next? An ashtray? An incense burner? A cylinder with an odd little tube coming out the side?
Mushrooms. Sheesh.
So anyway, a few weeks ago I decided I wanted to paint some mushrooms!
And what a lot of work this was. I got obsessed with every square inch of it. That colorful leaf near the top took two days to finish and was challenging to say the least. Painting the mushrooms made me happy. The little ridges look difficult but they're actually pretty satisfying to create. There are so many tiny things going on here, and they're the kinds of details you never notice, like what's happening in the gaps between the leaves and the little fly (can you find it?). I tried to do them justice, but that meant mixing tiny amounts of hundreds of different colors, I'm guessing.
I posted this painting on Facebook when I finished it last week, and a few people thought I was making up some of the colors, especially the ones on the bright leaf. Those people don't live in Illinois. Most of my Illinois pals agreed that this year the foliage was just this colorful. Lurid, even! I showed Jeff's daughter Melissa my reference photo last night, and she said I should put it on my blog.
So while I pumped up the colors somewhat, in real life that leaf was still pretty loud. :)
I'm really pleased with the way this turned out, and I'll have a few more fall paintings to add to this series.
Last week I painted a poster design for the Obama campaign (above), which I read about here. The slogan that appealed to me the most, and there were about a dozen of them from which to choose, was "Every child deserves a great school."
Since she's such a smart, adorable girl, and since she's brought me nothing but good luck in the past, I wanted my young friend Mabel to be the star of this poster. So what we have here is the sequel to a painting I created a year and a half ago!
Mabel is in kindergarten now, and I thought her contemplative pose (based on a photo taken by her mother Kate) was appropriate for this subject. Because Mabel's expression is slightly ambiguous here, I think you can read the poster two ways. Either she's happy at a good school, and the things you see around her are real, or she's unhappy at a failing school, and the things you see around her are imaginary. I painted Mabel realistically in watercolor, and in order to achieve a believable child art style for the background, I drew and painted the rest with my left hand, which as you can see operates at a shaky 3rd grade level at best. Here's a small, early plan I put together on graph paper before I started to work.
While I didn't change much in the final design, I added an extra child on the right side, and I turned one of the figures near the center into a kid version of Mabel's red-haired mother Melinda. (Mabel has two mothers, and they were granted a civil union last month--the whole family wore purple dresses on this great occasion. Genius Melinda wrote about the happy day here.)
As a former art teacher who worked in Illinois' public schools for seventeen years, the theme of this poster is especially meaningful to me. I realize that I don't stand a chance at winning the contest, and the irony of designing a poster about creating jobs--for free!--is not lost on me. But for me this was more about having The Idea and wanting to see it through. And painting Mabel again filled me with joy.
