Liriope
White Liriope, digital image on canvas, 32x16, 48x24
The liriope is in bloom. It’s bit late at our place because we don’t get a lot of sun, but no matter. Make some art.
Purple Liriope, digital image on canvas, 32x16, 48x24
Kodachrome
This is a Kodak Kodachrome Film Test from 1922. Love the color. Love the portraiture. Relieved it isn’t in 3D. via kottke.org
Bourbon Dogs
I know, I know, but once I’d come up with “Bourbon, Dog and Art” I had to make bourbon dogs. At least once. You take maybe a cup of barbecue sauce (my choice, many recipes use ketchup), a cup of brown sugar (I just threw in a pinch since the barbecue sauce is already kinda sweet) and at least (emphasis mine) a cup of bourbon and simmer it down to a thick brown liquid. I also chopped up a bunch of onion and threw it in. Then you add mass quantities of tiny weenies. The longer it simmers, the more flavorful it gets. A couple of hours is a minimum. Be sure to sample your remaining bourbon at various points during the process to make sure it isn’t going stale.
This is the sort of dish that half the people I know would love, and the other half would rather starve than be caught in the same room with. Don’t know what that says about me.
Anyway, it’s more fun to cook with bourbon that with wine. Now that I’ve conquered the basics, I’m sure there’s more sophisticated recipes.
Red Mushroom
Red Mushroom, digital image on canvas, 32x16, 48x24
Here’s a new artwork just completed. It’s yet another red mushroom. (A coincidence given my last art post. I’ve only done two. But it is the season.) I’ve decided to refer to this recent series as “animist portraits” since they have a certain portrait quality to them. I don’t want them confused with work done by botanical illustrators or macro-photographers. I just find things around our place and make them look good. I manipulate these images just like a Playboy photographer to create something that looks real but is maybe just a hairs-breath too-good-to-be-true. I’m not heading down that road where I’m going to look up scientific names, genus and species of the little bits of flora and fauna I start with to create these images. Biggest problem I have is naming these portraits. Relatively generic words like “leaf,” “seed,” “weed,” “grass,” etc. dominate my titles and as the series grows they fail as a useful reference. I’m going to keep thinking about it. Any suggestions?*
*Note that at least for the time being I’ve forsaken irony, which may come as a shock to folks who’ve known me well (and would thus think this is ironic). I just feel I’ve lost the desire and commitment necessary to be a respectable player in an Internet-assisted universe dominated by competitive irony. Somebody’s gotta just say normal stuff.
Friday the 13th
Yesterday was Friday the 13th, but one thing you never encounter around our place is any friggatriskaidekaphobia. (That’s fear of Friday the 13th for those of you who don’t read Wikipedia.) Why?
Many years ago, lost in the mists of time* we got married on the 13th. Since then we’ve always celebrated the 13th as our anniversary, regardless of month or year. It’s usually a quiet celebration consisting of wishing each other a happy anniversary in the morning and later, in the early evening, sitting somewhere out on our vast estate with several fingers of single malt, or Irish whiskey or a good bourbon and chatting while the sun goes down and the woods transition from day-shift activity to night-shift activity.
As luck would have it, Friday the 13th always falls on our anniversary, and therefore has just never been able to achieve any mental traction.
So to the business at hand and one of the raisin detras of this blog which is to occasionally discuss bourbon: Last evening we celebrated with a glass of Bulleit Bourbon “Frontier Whiskey.” Regardless of taste Bulleit would get high marks just on packaging alone, given its medicine-flask-raised-letters bottle, complete with cork top and old fashioned label. We have no pretensions to connoisseurship around here, but this is how an expert described Bulleit: “smells include rye toast, snack crackers, and brown butter… palate entry is remarkably savory, corny sweet, and nearly honey-like… attractive tastes of buttered popcorn, brown sugar, and nougat expand. Finishes with a spurt of fire and lots of long, corny/grainy tastes.” [from F. Paul Pacult’s Whiskey Review, iWhiskey iPhone app]
We, on the other hand, tend to rate bourbons on a binary scale of zero-to-one, one being good and zero being void of all goodness and undeserving to exist in this universe. We gave Bulleit a one.
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*I really wanted to write “in the midst of time” but lost my nerve figuring most folks would assume it was a typo instead of a brilliant play on words. Might be a good title for a sci-fi novel. Oops, a quick visit to Google indicates that it already is the title of a new age sci-fi novel. Plus there’s a number of blogs that have already used the phrase, some seemingly aware of the word-play conceit, but others just blissfully ignorant of their mistake. So never mind.
