Julia Childs said ““The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” This goes the same for making art, making visual art and the art of cooking are very, very similar. Both use primaries in their making, visual art the primary colors, red, green, blue, yellow, black, white, cooking, bitterness, saltiness, sourness, sweetness, Umami (savory). A blend or harmony or disharmony of these selections can make all the difference in the world in how one communicates their creation. We can get into all sorts of subtle nuances as well in our creation of food or visual art, what we choose to put into our creation is just as important as what we don’t put into our creation, foods, like visual images carry a cultural and political significance to them just as an image of a clock melting or a a lily pond can be loaded with signs and signifier.

I have been taking this approach to making my artwork and to my cooking, taking great care to find the proper ingredients to make food or collage. Cooking, like art, the medium is the message. How we prepare, what we prepare, how we consume, is deeply interwoven into the fabric of our entire planet. Do we buy factory raised meat, do we buy organic, do we boil, do we fry, or do we use oils or acrylics? To be bake or do we use a wok, do we photograph or do we sculpt, you get the picture. But in the end it comes down to what we are trying to communicate, I sometimes like to make an elegant dish of vegetables and meat, slow cooked and carefully deciding on the spices and how to create sauces, I also like to sometimes indulge in hot wings or greasy hamburger and fries. When it comes to art, I try to keep my palate just as diverse, consuming some classics and appreciating on the same level paint by numbers, but in the end I want quality, I don’t want to eat a 99 cent McDonalds hamburger and I don’t want to consume art that doesn’t provide nourishment. You are what you eat.