Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Stringbeans & My Art!

I love to draw, and I love to eat! Sometimes, honestly, the food part can really go into high gear.  I use to watch my family members, including my parents and aunts cook these fabulous meals and I learned a lot just by watching.  There were colors like purples in eggplants, reds, rich oranges, yellows and greens in the vegetables.  In the antipasto appetizers before a meal, there were beautiful plate full of ripe tomatoes, with cheeses, stuffed mushrooms, salami, prosciutto, eggplant, asparagus and olives.  I would admire the composition and how the colors played on one another and unlike art, in a matter of minutes it was all gone!  

On a past Sunday, I decided to take some farm market vegetables of tomatoes, in season this August, and sweet cucumbers to make a summer salad with olive oil, sea salt, oregano and some marsala cooking wine. I topped it off with some shaved provolone cheese.  After cooking some string beans with a variety of carrots, I added the same salad mixture, except including some tamari. The colors made me think of some landscape and architecture drawings that I did with reds and greens in them. My drawing of the Underground Westminster Subway station in London, had large areas of reddish oranges that reminded me of the tomatoes.  The landscape of Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan had rich greens with splashes of reds, pinks and oranges in the forest and there were my string beans and colorful variety of carrots!  

Color is a rich tool that makes an art piece in all its mediums come alive, and feeds our desires with satisfaction, very much like my vegetables did the job for me that summer evening on Sunday. If you would like to see some more color and interesting compositions, visit my website www.lcicioart.com 

Thank you and Bon Appetit!

Len