Letter 29 - Picture This

Renovation chaos has been a bit, well, chaotic of late. That, plus the request by one of my subscribers, has sparked today’s missive. It’s going to be a conceptually long read since a picture is worth 2^10 words.

You know the old saying that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail? The same way that to a surgeon, the obvious solution to a problem is “slice and dice”? Well, I’m here today to point out that to an artist, everything is a canvas.

It’s just hard wired in, seemingly. First example is baking. I’ve always been a cook but during Covid I, like many others, discovered the joy of sour dough starters when two things became clear. First, there wasn’t much fresh bread around and second, there wasn’t ANY yeast. You’re not going to make yummy, chewy bread without yeast and so the bread craving soon jumped on the “free from the air” wild yeast bandwagon and embraced sourdough.

Yet, is bread really enough? Of course not. It has to be “pretty” bread. Otherwise, what’s the point. And so I thought about how to add a little art to my carbs.

And what goes with bread? A good cuppa coffee! But my artistic espresso urge had nothing to do with Covid; it predated it by a good number of years. Way way back when baristas were making apples in their milky drinks I became aware of folks doing a bit more with the milk. Rosettes, they were called:

And I got the bug in the brain to do the same. Dived into the forums (Coffeegeek was a huge nexus of enthusiasts at the time) and traveled to the Pacific Northwest, epicenter of fancy coffee makin’.

Rather than waste time the way 99% of the practicioners did, buying a cheapie machine, getting dissatisfied, replacing it with a better one and finally getting a good one, I jumped immediately to a good one. And just as immediately purchased a couple of gallons of milk, a couple of pounds of beans, and took a day to pull a shot, attempt coffee art, throw away, repeat. A LOT of repeat.

Of course, after doing a goodly number of rosettes and other so-called free pours (the design is 100% due to me pouring the milk into the coffee, not other implements or tweaks involved) I wondered what might happen if I took up my paint brush. Or in this case, my temperature probe and pushed the milk around a bit.

Well, what happened was this!

Clearly the first is a self portrait of the tortured artist. The second was from that day that there was a bug in my coffee, natch. And the third? There be dragons!

Was that the limit for coffee art? Not so really. I began to wonder what would happen if, rather than making a picture IN the coffee, I used the coffee itself to make the picture. Not watercolor but coffeecolor! Turns out it works pretty well:

And then, round about when autumn rolled up, I began to wonder if something a bit more interesting could be done with pumpkins besides the overused “scoop ‘em out and put in a jagged smile”. Got me some clay carving tools and went to work:

See, it’s like Michelangelo said - the figure was always in the marble - someone just had to carve away the obscuring stuff. Good fun but, in the spirit of Halloween, they had a definite half-life and eventually all rotted into zombiehood.

And speaking of Halloween …

Nickyitis

Nicky’s got some carving skills as well. And artistic endeavors deserve reward!

That’s it for another week. Hope to hear from you!