Snack Attack!

Snack Attack!
Diptych
Gouache and acrylic on paper mounted on birch panels
12" h x 24"
2012

I love the corn cross section as a halo, don't you?!

This is the second from the series Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie, a project I'm doing with the help of a 2012 RACC Project Grant. It will prove to be a pretty intense year of painting—15 paintings by the end of October. My painting hand is already in a sad shape from long hours of painting for days on end. I have started to use a support glove while I'm working, and a stabilizer when I'm not working. And of course, doing hand exercises whenever I can. Hopefully, I will keep this in check. There are also enough other things going on right now that I take a day or two off from painting periodically.

So this is how this painting started—my favorite Thunderbird (Scott Tracy) riding side-saddle on a grilled corn on the cob missile, and Mr. Spock surfing in on a Pringle.



The sacred geometry design here is based on the corn (but of course) and once again the 5-petal shape of the potato flower. And while I was concentrating on painting the sacred geometry, I spilled a jar of paint on Scott Tracy. I did my best to clean it up, but the stain is permanent (and will be fixed later).



Right by the front gate of the junior high I attended in Taiwan, there was this vendor who sold freshly grilled corn on the cob (with lots of hot sauce!). He was there everyday when school let out. My friends and I would each get a corn on the cob and would eat them as we walked to our respective bus stops (absolutely contrary to what we had been taught—to never eat while walking). I would get home just in time to catch the Thunderbirds, a British puppet sci-fi show. After I came to the US, my American mom would always give me a small bowl of Pringles as a snack after I got home from high school, and I could watch Star Trek before dinner.



The finished piece is the top image.

Bamboo Mountain, Potato Hill

Bamboo Mountain, Potato Hill
Diptych
Gouache and acrylic on paper mounted on birch panels
12" h x 24" w
2012

Other than The Laundry Maze, I've also started working on my new painting project, Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie, a series of diptychs that will be exhibited in Seattle in September and in Portland in November. The first piece is Bamboo Mountain, Potato Hill, a nostalgic look at one of my favorite foods from when I was growing up in Taiwan (fresh bamboo shoots) and how much I missed it when I first moved here. Both the bamboo shoot and potato are root vegetables that are fairly inexpensive (in the proper regions), and both are very versatile in terms of culinary use.

I did not return to Taiwan for 7 years, and one of the first things my grandmother made for me was bamboo shoot soup!

Here's a shot of how it started. You can see that I'm playing with some ideas that I ended up not using (the drawing of a sprouted potato on the lower right).



The bamboo's cellular architecture and the potato flower are both 5-segmented. And I use this 5-segment structure as starting points. I'm using sacred geometry to denote many things -- the cosmos, the planet, the divider and unifier of the two sides/panels, but also to create a sense of myth and mystery. But it also gives me the pleasure of playing with patterns, which I love to do.

Here it is, fairly far along.



And the finished piece is the top photo.