Feasting on Art

I rarely return home from the grocery store without some sort of brassica in my basket. This is the second week in a row we have enjoyed brussels sprouts roasted simply with a bit of parmesan finished with a squeeze of lemon. The cheese gives the dish a salty-meatiness and the lemon provides a balancing freshness. Excellent paired with an icy dry white wine, the dish could accompany a standard main course or stand on its own topped with a fried egg.

Edward Weston, Cabbage Leaf, 1931
gelatin silver print, 19.1 x 24.1 cm

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In the most basic sense, Egg and cauliflower still life by George Lambert is a study in texture. The bulging florets of cauliflower are offset by the smooth shell of the egg. In a memorable dish, the combination of texture is just as important as the fusion of flavour. Taking a cue from Lambert’s textural investigation, the recipe for pan-fried buttered cauliflower with a poached egg seeks to maintain the differences in texture in the resulting dish. By roughly chopping the cauliflower into a range of sizes, the contrast in shape allows the smaller fragments to become dark and crispy while the larger florets maintain their form and become soft to the tooth. The almonds add a bit more crunch and the poached egg provides a luxuriously smooth sauce. Cobbled together in less that twenty minutes, the dish works equally well as the centerpiece of a weekend brunch or a quick weeknight meal.

George Lambert, Egg and cauliflower still life, 1926
oil on canvas, 34.3 x 44.1 cm, Art Gallery of South Australia

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The name ‘still life’, when referring to the genre, was derived from the French nature morte, which literally translates to dead nature. The irony is not lost that a still life, depicting the nourishing foods that maintain life, is cast in a substance that simultaneously preserves food and prevents growth – thus embodying both life and death. Consumption and environmental decline are issues at the forefront of the work with the salt highlighting the death of the ecosystem from which the groundwater is pumped. The salt sculptures with their ghostly pallor and the effervescent fleeting ice forms embody the transient nature of the organic products. Through modern farming practices, shallow rooted plants replace native vegetation enabling the dissolved salts stored in the ground to rise and contaminate water systems on the surface. The result is saline water, demonstrating the way both water and salt are intrinsically linked. Through the Yonetani’s work, the need for a conscious awareness of where food is sourced and how its consumption effects the environment is reinforced.

Ken + Julia Yonetani, Still Life: The Food Bowl, 2011, Murray River salt,* dimensions variable (all objects life size), Copyright the Artists and Artereal Gallery, Sydney

* All the salt in this work was obtained from SunSalt, and originates from the Buronga Salt Interception Scheme on the Murray River.

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Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were two of the most influential Modernist artists working in the first half of the twentieth century. The two artists met in 1905 at one of the gatherings of Gertrude Stein who was a patron of Picasso‘s. Their work was – and still is – often compared and upon meeting, the two become both lifelong friends and rivals. Whereas Picasso often conjured his compositions from his imagination, Matisse preferred to work from nature and would complete much more expansive interiors around his subjects.

Left: Pablo Picasso, Vase, Bowl and Lemon, 1907,
oil on panel, 62 x 48 cm, Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Right: Henri Matisse, Still Life with Blue Tablecloth (detail), 1909,
88 x 118 cm, oil on canvas, The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

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Green is one of the most abundant colors; there are greens in every imaginable shade and tone throughout the world’s natural landscapes. From green algae to rainforest canopies, green permeates and dominates in its diversity. Individual greens are often blurred as countless plants merge into a color field, many overlapping green leaves forming the density of forests or millions of blades blending to become a sports field’s smooth surface. The simultaneous layering and highlighting that is seen in nature can be compared to the artwork of Jonathan Monk, who’s layering of meaning and medium fuse together history, critique, and technique. Monk’s 2002 work, Green with hidden Noise combines a single solid swath of green painted roughly on a white wall with a slide projection focused directly atop this patch of color. The circular projection itself appears to depict a green scene: a forest of trees? The composition is green on green.

Jonathan Monk, Green with hidden Noise, 2002,
slide installation and wall painting, image courtesy Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe and Berlin

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