Brits to the rescue

I am always amazed at how you can ask an obscure question on the internet and within a few hours come up with an answer!

The question was what this fancy food concoction is, pictured on a needlepoint panel in the International Honor Quilt project.

Four readers directed me to a page from Mrs. Beeton's cookbook that has to be the model for this panel.

But what is it?  You find it on a page called "cold collations" and this one is entitled "lamb cutlets."  What's a cold collation?

Apparently we would call it a buffet -- a bunch of cold foods arrayed on a bountiful table with an eye to visual as well as culinary appeal.  (And some writers suggested the visual could greatly outdo the culinary.)

So I think I can see the lamb chop shapes in the needlepoint panel; the one on the top seems to have a little paper frill on the tip of its bone (it looked like a puff of steam to me at first).  But I still have no idea what else we're looking at.

How come the lamb chops are white?  Are they propped or mayonnaised into position around a round loaf of rye bread or a pudding, or is it a thin food shell over a plain upended bowl?  What makes up the green and red decorations? What's the braid effect at the bottom?

Way more questions than I had to begin with.

But a huge thank you to the readers who again stepped up to help allay my ignorance.  You're wonderful!

Working on ornaments

If it's December, it must be Christmas ornament time.  I've been doing personalized ornaments for at least 40 years and it's about the only holiday thing I'm compulsive about.  Don't care if I bake cookies or not, don't care if we're home or away, don't even care if we put up a tree (I love a real tree but it's physically difficult to wrangle it into place and decorate it -- so we gave that up several years ago).  A couple of years we didn't even put up outdoor lights and the world didn't come to an end.

But always Christmas ornaments; couldn't live without them.

I try to make each year's batch different from the last, and that's getting to be harder.  Although certain family members say they like sewed ornaments best, I enjoy trying out different materials. Since some ornament recipients read the blog, and I have to keep it a surprise until they actually open their packages, I won't tell you much about the plan this year except to show you some of the tools I am using.

Construction is complicated this year because of my bad back, which sometimes isn't happy when I stand up to work.  So for the last couple of days I have been doing a trash-TV-ornament marathon.  I'll watch TV for a while, working either on the sit-down part of the ornaments or on a sewing project.  At the commercial, I'll hit pause and go in to work at the workbench for a bit.  Sometimes I can get three minutes in before I have to go back and sit down, other times a bit more.  Usually by the next commercial I've recovered enough for another couple of minutes of work.

At the moment I am all caught up on the sit-down finishing, so the big pressure is to come up with enough stamina to do the stand-up part.  I estimate I still have two or three hours of stand-up, and several more of sit-down, so I'm starting to get nervous.  Hoping for a good day (that happens every now and then) when I might even be able to work for more than a few minutes at a time.

But I'm only an hour of work away from getting the international packages in the mail, which takes the worst of the pressure off.  And fortunately about half the ornaments are for local delivery, so I have until December 24 to finish.

In past years I have made an offer to my faithful blog readers: leave me a comment and I'll choose one of you to receive a personalized ornament.  That has been fun, so let's do it again!  Entry deadline is Sunday night before I go to bed.  Don't leave it till the last minute; I might be really tired that night.

Calling all Brits

Several weeks ago I had a fabulous success after asking for help from my faithful readers on a problem that arose while I was cataloguing the panels in the International Honor Quilt project.  That cry for help was for translating or transliterating some Inuit words embroidered on a panel made in northern Quebec, and amazingly, within a couple of hours I had more than one volunteer!

Now I have another cry for help, but this one on the other side of the ocean.  I need someone more familiar with British culinary customs than I am.

This panel -- executed in beautiful needlepoint -- was made to honor Isabella Beeton, the famous early cookbook writer, and its centerpiece is this elaborate food fantasia.  The person who catalogued the panels 20 years ago thought it was a roast, but I don't, despite the lethally sharp knife in the background.  Is it some kind of Christmas pudding?  And what's the little white cloud of steam being emitted at top right?

I'll be wildly grateful for any help you can provide!

Art reader's digest

From "Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures" by Michael Baxandall:

'Influence' is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who is the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account.  If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X.  But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality.  ....

If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appripriate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pick up, take on, engage with, react to, quote, differentiate oneself from, assimilate oneself to, align oneself with, copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody, extract from, distort, attend to, resist, simplify, reconstitute, elaborate on, develop, face up to, master, subvert, perpetuate, reduce, promote, respond to, transform, tackle... everyone will be able to think of others.  Most of these relations just cannot be stated the other way round -- in terns of X acting on Y rather than Y acting on X.  To think in terms of influence blunts thought by impoverishing the means of differentiation.

----

Kathy talking now:  Artists often have mixed feelings when they admit to being influenced by some other artist.  On the one hand, if it's a famous, well-regarded artist, you're kind of proud to have studied with her or to recognize elements of her practice or attitude in your own work.  On the other hand, is there a more condescending, withering adjective that can be applied to artwork than "derivative"?

As a writer, I love the use of a grammatical argument to make what is actually a more profound point: that your relationship to other artists, both your contemporaries and those of the past, is controlled by YOU!  Yes, you can choose to make swoopy shapes like Matisse cutouts or to cut improvisational shapes like Nancy Crow, but it's still your decision and your hand that executes that decision.  And if Henri or Nancy lurks somewhere in the back of your consciousness as you work, it's YOU who shapes the thought process.

So if you have somebody in your consciousness, do yourself the honor of understanding that relationship.  Take the time to think about what you pick and choose from that person, and define it exactly.  If you know, for instance, that you love Nancy Crow's method of improvisation cutting, but you don't particularly like her way of composing the entire quilt on the design wall before you start to sew, then you have taken a big step toward understanding yourself.

influenced by Nancy Crow: of course!



















I believe it is always a good idea to articulate what's going on in your own head and your own life; if you can't say what it is, you can neither control your own behavior nor expect other people to appreciate your work.

I challenge you to think this week about the artists who lurk in your own consciousness, and define their place in your head and your work.  And then to contemplate what that greater understanding might mean to your art.

Photo suite 205 -- sorry, garage closed today

Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving holiday didn't start out too auspiciously in our house.  Yesterday afternoon the cleaning lady told me that the kitchen sink was leaking.  Sure enough, the U-shaped trap had rusted through to leave a little hole at the bottom of the curve.  I griped about how much it was going to cost to call a plumber on the holiday, or how I was going to prepare the food I needed to bring to the holiday feast without water.

She helpfully unscrewed the rusted pipe and said "just go to Home Depot and get a new trap, and screw it in, and you won't even need a plumber."  Then she got the mop, which she hadn't even put away yet after doing the floor the first time, and cleaned everything up beautifully.

In retrospect I should have said, as soon as the leak was announced, "Hold it -- I will do emergency repairs until I can have the plumber come on Friday or Saturday."  I should have then gotten my trusty roll of duct tape and wrapped the leaky pipe ten or twelve times around, and used the sink sparingly.  Heck, we didn't even have to get ready for holiday guests, just bake a pie and make some cranberry something-or-other and take it to my son's house for the dinner.

But did I do the right thing?  No, I watched her unscrew the pipe.  And I sent my husband to Home Depot for a new trap.  Which was the wrong size, so he went back again.  Then we attempted to screw in the new one.  Sparing the gory details, it didn't work.  Except that I cut my finger on the threaded end of the pipe, a sure sign of cheap crap hardware.  (When's the last time you cut your finger on any threaded object?  Right.  Because you generally own decent hardware.)

After a while we decided to give up and have a drink.  We will call the plumber on Friday and see when he can come over.  If that won't be soon, we will eat out.

So instead of being crabby, I'm going to be thankful.  The leak did not occur after a dozen guests arrived for Thanksgiving dinner, nor did it flood out a kitchen floor full of switched-on electrical appliances, books and magazines, or five-year-olds. It will not prevent me from baking a pumpkin pie, just from washing the dishes afterwards (and have you ever noticed that dirty dishes are patient, just as dirty on Monday as they were on Thursday morning?)

I'm thankful that we can afford to call a plumber, even if it's going to cost a lot more than wrestling with the cheap crap pipe from Home Depot, and that we can afford to eat out if the plumber can't come till Monday.  Thankful that the leak was in an easily accessible, totally visible pipe, not hidden inside a wall.  Thankful that we discovered the leak within minutes of it appearing, not upon returning from a month-long vacation.

Thankful that we didn't lose our power for a week after a storm, or have a tree fall on our roof. Thankful that nobody has a terminal disease, that those with serious ailments are under treatment, and that everybody can see a doctor -- and pay for it -- when they need one.

not our house, thank heavens

Thankful that we have not had a foreign terrorist attack in the United States since 2001 and that most of our fellow citizens are willing to extend a welcome to refugees from terrible wars around the globe. Thankful that despite the petty annoyances and frustrations, we still have a pretty fabulous life, one that millions of people from other countries would brave unspeakable dangers to try to achieve.

Thankful for art, both the art we look at and the art we make.   Thankful for friends, both in person and over the Internet, who make our lives so rich.  Thankful for the opportunity to connect with you all, and thankful that you honor me by reading my blog.  A happy Thanksgiving to you all.