Sustained Investigation 3

This artwork is part of a sustained investigation series focusing on the question; How can I represent the journey food goes through from field to plate in artwork format? This is a pretty open question if I'm being honest however it leaves so much space for interpretation that the ideas I can connect with it are never ending, and to be honest that was the whole idea. I didn't ant to be boxed into a corner that had me doing four different pieces of art that I didn't like. The artwork itself is water color and pen painting/drawing combination of a Southern Italian town in the early hours of the day. It is centered around a young woman carrying a market basket and walking home to her expectant father, who is pictured under the orange restaurant. There is also someone else walking in the background of the image who is also up and doing errands before the town wakes up. Of course I had to have a rooster somewhere in the painting, and so he is scampering away in the bottom right hand corner. I wanted to make it clear that the town was in a warm place such as the south of Italy so I painted a bright blue sky and a nice full palm tree. The picture is on a weird old fashioned paper, that is much like papyrus that I have never seen before and it is 6"x4". I actually love the paper and have used it for the past two assignments, I feel it perfectly represents the well-worn but put-together look of the Mediterranean culture of which I am painting. The painting just kind of came tome after painting the last piece Due, Il Mercato, and I just started painting without any real plan. So there is no sketch to show my thought process. It took about at least 4 hours and thats where I lost count. It was insanely time consuming all though I a proud of it and I think it goes with the series very well.

This piece is part of a series however whereas in the past the pictures have been painted in perfect sequential order and it is easy to see where they would belong, this one as I stated earlier just kind of came to me so it is not as well defined as the other ones. A proper restaurant any where in Europe or in bigger cities here in the US would go to the markets to pick out the best food and also the freshest. In the case of the girl in the picture it is her parents restaurant and she is merely going out to pick up their ingredients. After the farmer has bestowed his goods on the vendor fora small fee, the vendor goes out to the village in hopes of selling his goods to the village's people, so the village is the next installment of the series even if the name is a little bit misleading. So in the chronological order of how food gets to the table from somewhere out in the ethos, the village is the third and an important leg of the journey. The young woman in the picture is wearing more Mediterranean style clothing as is the person in the far background and the father has a nice round belly and messy apron, fitting of a chef worth his stuff. The rooster adds whimsy to the piece and is important to me as well as the series because it ties them all together. Previous roosters have been depicted a little more like a cartoon but this piece is the most realistic yet, so it's rooster needed to be the most realistic yet. He is flying/running away from some evil that only chickens can see, and he is doing so franticly as he is losing feathers in the process.

I'm insanely pleased with the detail in this piece, even while I was painting it I wasn't sure f the quality level I wanted would be possible with my chosen medium. Water color is a rather pesky medium and if you know me then you would know my favorite method of painting is acrylic because I have utter control, and with water color, sometimes you just have to let it do its thing. This was the only the second time in a long while that I have used water color because it is so pesky. But I liked the look of it so much in the last piece and also brainwashed myself into think that it was a faster process than acrylic. This piece was much harder than the last because I wanted to have very minute detail that would have been something I would have done with acrylic. It was a real struggle and there are a few places I definitely messed up (those I'm not going to list because that would give away the secrets of the piece). Painting or drawing people is always a challenge and one I have talked about before in artist statements of this series so that was hard especially drawing faces, and its why I opted to have the young women's back turned. I really like how the chef looks, he was a challenge to paint and I drew inspiration from Chef Pisghetti from Curious George. I also really like the palm tree and think I nailed the layers of palm fronds. Overall I think this is a great installment and ready for the final installment, IL PIATTO.