November, 2014 | Beverly Shipko, Artist

The Art of Food

November 30, 2014 by Beverly

I found an intriguing blog post showing a salad plate arrangement (on the right) that was inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s Painting 201 (on the left). This is certainly a unique take on life imitating art!

I wish my Thanksgiving plate had looked this artistic. But then maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to eat it….!

You can take a closer look here. Research showed that a Kandinsky-inspired salad was not only rated as tasting much better, but restaurant diners were willing to pay twice as much for it than a traditionally arranged salad using the same ingredients!

Future chefs and restauranteurs, take note!

Another Food Artist in the Family!

November 30, 2014 by Beverly

Given the recent Thanksgiving holiday, it feels right to talk about food and art. It’s probably not surprising to you that I spend a lot of time looking at the presentation of food, whether it’s at home, at restaurants and bakeries, parties, and especially at weddings (I can picture those dessert banquet tables now!).

Nor would you be surprised to learn that I’m one of those people who takes photos of their plates at restaurants, which is just one of many reasons why I have more than 85,000 pictures on my computer.

Over Thanksgiving, I photographed our own Chef Bonnie preparing a feast for the four of us that made my mouth water in anticipation. I felt like I was watching her play the starring role on a new Food Network Show show called Bonnie’s Thanksgiving Feast Challenge.

Instead of competing against others, she competes against herself, each year raising the bar higher and higher. Bonnie, who is a special education teacher by day, spent her “free” time last week planning 23 different recipes, far exceeding the number of recipes from previous years. She researched her recipes online (carefully avoiding mushrooms for Laura’s sake), printed them out, systematically made a grocery list, and did her own grocery shopping after work. (Bonnie was so organized that Jay only had to make one quick trip to the store.) Prep work began Tuesday night while cooking and baking began in earnest on Wednesday, extending through Thursday right up to showtime.

I was mesmerized watching Bonnie calmly preparing her cornucopia of food, moving confidently from one dish to another. It was when I looked at this beautifully composed, picture-perfect root vegetable tray waiting to go into the oven that I realized I had been watching the other food artist in the family!

Here’s the rest of the team. Sometimes it takes a village just to keep up with all the pots and pans.

Bonnie’s final menu included 2 turkey recipes (she makes a wicked herbed turkey lemon recipe), with homemade cranberry sauce, her infamous popovers (nothing makes Bonnie happier than to see how them really “pop”!), her trademark stuffin’ muffins (gluten and non-gluten versions), and numerous side dishes (I lost count) from root vegetables, sweet potato casserole, spaghetti squash to wild rice with cranberries.

Here we are all dressed up and ready to get stuffed, especially Chef Bonnie, who looks amazingly fresh after all her hard work!

I decided to learn from previous years and pace myself by taking small portions of everything. (I’m getting hungry again just looking at my plate!)

We took a break before attacking the 5 desserts – including three delectable gluten-free selections. Needless to say, Bonnie sampled everything as you can see from her plate. (When people talk about Bonnie and desserts in the same breath, they are talking about the food!)

Thanksgiving is always a special family occasion since Jay, Bonnie, Laura and I are all together. (I’m thinking Tom Selleck and his family around the holiday table on Blue Bloods.) Laura makes the 10 hour trip (if she’s lucky) from Urbana, Illinois where she is working on her Ph.D. The four of us love every minute of eating one delicious dish after the other, each one more flavorful than the next. Even the cleanup is fun (well, most of the time…). Ellen Degeneres, we’re giving you a run for your money with this selfie!

So Bonnie, it’s official – you won! Congratulations on beating all previous Thanksgiving benchmarks – both in quantity and quality – and winning your Thanksgiving Feast Challenge! Maybe next year I’ll take some video to demonstrate your many talents for your show’s online debut… Just a thought. We are grateful to have a food artist in the house besides me – one that actually makes food instead of painting it!

I hope all of you enjoyed Thanksgiving as much as we did!

It’s The Little Things In Life

November 23, 2014 by Beverly

Sometimes little things can make a big difference.

I was reminded of that today while I was cleaning up after a painting session – which only lasted an hour but created a big mess! For many years, this was a huge issue since it took a half hour just to get the paint off my hands, let alone my brushes. If I had a free hour, I wouldn’t even think about picking up a paint brush since the cleanup time was so long.

Anyone visiting my home studio can see that I am not the neatest painter in the world. I use a lot of brushes and have a nasty habit of not putting the caps back on my oil paint tubes. While I tried many non-toxic cleaners through the years, none of them seemed to work well with oils, especially on my hands. I walked around with stained hands and kept my nails short so the paint under my nails wouldn’t look so obnoxious, often dreaming about the good old days when I used water-soluble acrylics to avoid the whole cleanup issue.

Little did I know how my life would change for the better when my friend Janet, the office manager for my nutritionist, recommended a new non-toxic household cleaning product called Branch Basics. A week later, I was painting in the late afternoon and had totally lost track of time. All of a sudden, I realized that my husband and I were supposed to leave for a party in 45 minutes. I looked down at my hands and groaned out loud because they were covered in red, blue and green paint, all primary colors that stain the skin quite badly (I was working on a cupcake with sprinkles on top). In desperation, I spotted the bottle of Branch Basics next to the sink, grabbed it and began spraying my hands, just like I did today when they were covered in Oreo Cookie brown paint.

Then I used paper towel to start wiping the paint off. To my surprise (and yes, I am still surprised every time!), the paint actually began coming off easily.

Voila! It’s really quite amazing that it only took 3 minutes to get my hands completely clean! I had the feeling I was watching a magic trick that collapsed 30 minutes into 3 minutes – and did the job better too. (Please excuse me if I am starting to sound like an infomercial. By the way, we did make it to the party on time.)

I decided to share this wonderful product with all of you so you can stop your search for the perfect hand cleaner. As far as I know, Branch Basics is only available online. I would recommend purchasing the Starter Kit shown below at http://branchbasics.com/shop/starter-kit-small/

Branch Basics Starter Kit

The product comes in a concentrated form that can be diluted for various uses that are discussed in the user guide that comes with your shipment, and which is posted online at http://branchbasics.com/user-guide/. I use the 1:1 ratio on my hands, which means mixing 1 part Branch Basics concentrate with 1 part water. If you decide to try the product and would like a 15% discount, please contact me and I’ll send you the code.

I am starting to experiment with cleaning my brushes using the undiluted form. For the moment, I am still using a combination of olive oil and The Masters Brush Cleaner. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I have a busy day scheduled tomorrow, and look forward to picking up my paint brush for the limited time I do have between commitments – hopefully more than once. It’s still hard to believe how this one little thing has given me so much more flexibility to paint in short intervals throughout the day, and how dramatically it has changed my attitude toward painting with oils. I hope it does the same for you.

Inside Out: Frank Gehry’s Strata Center

November 3, 2014 by Beverly

Every once in a while everyone needs to get out of their comfort zone.

That’s why I look forward to working on my bi-monthly Art Card. It’s an opportunity to open myself up, to experiment with and explore different subjects and art forms. My artist friend Liz De Betheune and I run an Art Card Group, initially started by Mia and Annie (two of Liz’s sisters), with 18 artist members who create original postcard-size art based on an assigned theme, and exchange cards with other members. The latest theme was Positive/Negative.

Ever since Liz and I selected the theme, I kept thinking about Frank Gehry and the Strata Center at MIT. After finally revisiting my Cambridge photos from June, I realized that a key design element that dazzles me is Gehry’s masterful use of 3-D positive and negative space to energize buildings in surprising ways, both in the exterior and interior.

Frank Gehry is a prize winning contemporary architectect who literally turned modern architecture on its ear by removing right angles and straight lines from his architectural vocabulary, and introducing new, innovative materials with contrasting surfaces such as corrugated steel and shiny metal. Gehry designed the Guggenheim Museum Bilboa in Spain, his most renowned work that has become a major tourist destination in its own right – and is certainly on my bucket list.

While I had seen several Gehry complexes before, such as Gehry’s home in Venice, CA, the IAC Building off the West Side Highway in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, and the newer and expansive Millennium Park Pavillion in Chicago, I had never been as captivated by them as much as by the Strata Center. This huge innovative complex takes up 750,000 square feet, and is both an inspiration and counterpoint for the heavy-duty scientific research that goes on inside its walls (unlike any other walls I have seen, that’s for sure!) – an ever-present reminder to think outside the box.

From the street, the outside of the Strata Center looks like a series of unexpected moving shapes and unique structures that is strung together temporarily, deconstructing traditional norms along the way. A plethora of materials greet you. Textured brick surfaces mingle with polished metal creating pulsing forms of contrasting colors and shadows.

Fortunately, for the first time, I was able to go inside a Gehry building, where my senses were initially overwhelmed by the dynamic design of interior space – a positive and awe inspiring thing in this instance. Vibrating space pushed and pulled, turned and twisted, contracted and expanded. Walking on the higher floors was somewhat challenging and disorienting initially as the walkways whooshed around. Unlike most buildings, I could see where I wanted to go, but couldn’t get there.

The unexpected use of strong color on the inside increased the feeling of drama. In the hour that I had, I was only able to walk around a small part of the complex. Next time I’ll wander around the roof, a concept that Gehry essentially redefined.

I thought it was interesting that Bill Gates sponsored one of the Strata Center towers, and that Mark Zuckerberg chose Frank Gehry to design the new Facebook headquarters. What a bold and exciting statement! And how appropriate that the tech world is not just content with revolutionizing our social experience, but is now turning our brick and mortar world inside out too. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance tour the new Facebook headquarters when it opens in 2015.

Ultimately, I decided to work with my Gehry Strata Center photos for this my art card contribution. I started by assembling a composite of several interior shots in a folding rectangular format, a rather traditional concept in the end.

By eliminating the mental restriction of a rectangular shaped card, the idea felt more like Gehry in spirit. So I created a second card.

The card has an element of surprise by unfolding into something much larger (over a foot long) and unexpected, mimicking my experience with the Strata Center on a micro level. I was happy with my Positive/Negative contribution and mailed both of them in the end.

Thanks to the Art Card Group for keeping me from being too complacent, and encouraging me to explore new paths and grow as an artist. One day I’ll even buy Photoshop and really move out of my comfort zone!