Welcome back GUTsters!
We’re halfway through our month of daily drawings, and the chat is a chirping, barking menagerie of animal life. Your drawings look amazing. I love this peek into everyone’s neighborhood wildlife and the stories you’re sharing about your local creatures. It feels like a lot of you are connecting more deeply with the animals as you draw (even the bugs in the bathroom!).
It’s not too late to jump in on our daily drawing adventure—new week, new theme, new artists! You can go back to our kickoff dispatch to get caught up on how it works and how to participate.
WEEK 3: DAILY FOOD
This week’s theme is…FOOD.
How often are you really taking in the shapes, colors, and textures of your food? How a bowl of cereal changes over time. Or an egg, whether it’s fried with frilly edges or a luscious, soft scramble. Or the little nubs on a ripe, wild blackberry (officially called drupelets, what a great name!). It’s a fully bursting season for those of us sweating through the height of summer.
You may know that I’ve spent a lot of time visually contemplating food and drink. I’ve published five books on the topic! *Snaps suspenders.* Considering I draw mostly from life, that is a lot of looking at food (and tea and booze.) In case you missed any of them, here they are in chronological order: early on I made two fun scratch-and-sniff books—one about wine and one about whiskey—with master sommelier Richard Betts and Crystal English Sacca. I drew a beautiful little primer on tea with Sebastian Beckwith and Caroline Paul. I co-edited an ode to the groundbreaking, underappreciaed life, work and hand-painted recipes of barrier-busting designer Cipe Pineles with Sarah Rich, Debbie Millman, and Maria Popova. And, of course, I spent many years making the cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat with Samin Nosrat. Making that book with Samin was how I myself learned to cook (and enjoy it).
Drawing is a tool to help us pay attention, look closely at something, see it with fresh eyes, and celebrate it. Food offers us an excellent opportunity to do just that. And we get to eat the model when we’re done. Let’s do that this week with our daily drawings. (The looking and the eating, both.)
Before our assignment, I’m serving up a gallery of mouth-watering artwork by other artists for inspiration, and my own stab at the assignment to kick us off. Ready?
(Get it? crEATive. Creative, with EAT in the middle. As in food. HAHAHA. Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. )
More food (art) for thought
Itsuo Kobayashi
For over three decades, former cook Itsuo Kobayashi has drawn every meal he has eaten. You can read more about him here.
Cipe Pineles
Here are a couple spreads from her hand-drawn, handwritten cookbook of family recipes she wrote and illustrated and tucked away in her home. It stayed there for decades…until I discovered the original at an antiquarian bookstore! My friends and I worked our butts off to bring her legacy back into the light. The result: Leave me Alone with the Recipes.
Peter Menzel, Hungry Planet
As we draw what we eat this week, I thought of Peter Menzel’s photographs documenting what families eat and spend in a week around the world. The radical difference between diets is astounding and tells such a powerful story about the way we live. You can see all his photos here.
