Delicious: Peaches, Sows, Julie&Julia

Winter is my busy creative season – not much else to do when it’s so cold outside. As result, I haven’t been posting much. But now I have some miscellaneous updates. I am working on some gouache experiments (more on those later). Shipped out new paintings to Park City (more on that later too). Then got my haircut which I should do more often because I came home to unexpected news. One is a heads up from Google alert that Edible Austin’s Winter 2009 issue features “Peaches” painting in an editorial “Edible Pocketbook: The Myth of More” by Helen Cordes. I hope it’s in the hardcopy of the magazine as well.

The other big news is from Wally Workman letting me know that “Crowning the Grand Sow” has sold. I particularly love this painting not only for its mysterious allegorical imagery (it gives me a warm fuzzy) but also because I’ve fiddled with it for a year. I chronicled its creation in this painting demo post.

Other miscellaneous and edible stuff: This past weekend I watched the movie Julie & Julia with Meryl Streep as Julia Childs and Amy Adams as writer/blogger Julie Powell. Loved it. It speaks to my obsessive self, of learning a craft and creating for sheer love or compulsion. Katha Pollitt’s review of it is so right on:

What I loved most of all, though, was that Julie & Julia is that very rare thing, a movie centered on adult women, and that even rarer thing, a movie about women’s struggle to express their gifts through work. Not a boyfriend, a fabulous wedding, a baby, a gay best friend, a better marriage, escape from a serial killer, the perfect work-family balance, another baby. Real life is full of women for whom work is at the center, who crave creative challenge, who are miserable until they find a way to make a mark on the world. But in the movies, women with big ambitions tend to be Prada-wearing devils or uptight thirtysomethings who relax when they find a slacker boyfriend or inherit an adorable orphan. Among recent films, Seraphine, Martin Provost’s biopic about an early-twentieth-century French cleaning woman and self-taught painter, is practically unique in its curiosity about a woman’s creative drive. More usually, a woman’s cinematic function is to forward, thwart, complicate or decorate the story of a man. As Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s elusive girlfriend in (500) Days of Summer, Zooey Deschanel has all the external trappings of individuality–aloofness, a sly smile, vintage clothes and indie tastes–but she has no more inner life than Petrarch’s Laura. She’s there to break the hero’s heart and rekindle his ambitions. What will she become? Someone else’s wife. – Katha Pollitt, The Female Gourmet

BTW, I did almost enroll at Le Cordon Bleu back when I thought I had better find a backup plan in case painting didn’t pan out. Luckily I had a husband who told me I painted better than I cooked.