I've been thinking about frameworks and planning for the coming year, with lots of opportunity to model ideas with clean language, space and embodied landscapes.
The thesis will be a feast of culinary delights - each chapter a separate dish of its own flavours, herbs and spices. The dishes may seem unusual combinations for a meal at first, and some may be more accustomed to being served together than others, but I am confident that it will all fuse into a delicious feast, one dish offsetting another, to become replete for guests from diverse places to share together or apart.
The modelling may not have produced written texts as yet, it's early days and not to that part of the schedule yet. However it is certainly coming effortlessly into form (of some kind!) as I spent the next afternoon inspired to make a gorgeous feast-in-a-dish for a friend coming for supper. It's a goats-milk lasagne with spiced black lentils, lemon, nutmeg, layers of herby tomato, rice and cornmeal pasta, fennel, peppers, garlic, onions, three types of mushroom, and topped with a goats cheese brought back from Portugal. With steamed kale and a sesame oil dressing, Portuguese red wine. Fresh fruit salad of melon, apple, mango, nectarine and Sicilian prickly pear liqueur with greek honey and yoghurt for desert. Yummy yummy!
Modelling sustenance for thesis writing has also proved interesting and inspiring with instant physical response. I've been getting more and more into flowers this summer - photographing them, writing about them, animating them, enjoying others' writing about them (Emily Carr in Vancouver in particular). Also spheres, but that's another story... So it wasn't too surprising to model a sphere of wild meadow flowers as a symbol ('transmission device' is the name I'm currently using for this particular kind of function) of daily sustenance for focused thesis writing for the coming months. The day after drawing the complete sphere, the idea grew, sitting in the garden in the sun, to create a calendar-like grid that would conveniently fit a sketch book page, making it 21 x 14 squares in size, a total of 296 squares, which is a year less 69 days, to that date leading to the 1st June 2012. A good length of time. The mission is to find and draw (from life0 a flower (not necessarily wild) every day, in each box, along the way. At first I thought I might photograph the flowers too, or create some kind of growing composite of the flowers drawn. That was quickly released as being an unnecessary layer of frill. The actual task is an absolute jy, and the complexity of each single flower is awe-inspiring. By the third day I wondered if I should retrain as a botanical illustrator. By the fourth I just gave in to the admiration of each flower. How can I possibly find 296 flowers out of all the thousands of varieties that are present just in the places I walk each day? Except to follow the only way, of choosing just the one that calls that moment of that day. And knowing that there will always be a million more to enjoy :)
Day 2: Hollyhock, growing in the crack between the tarmac drive and brick wall, just outside my back door.
Making mead and metheglin with the summer sun are on this month's agenda. Not surprisingly, flower wine is now a must (pun intended!) too.
Again, unusual flavours present themselves as appealing ingredients to combine...
Red sage (from the garden), red clover and elderberry (from Castle Hill, Mere Down) and lemon wine is the first to brew, with golden rod (from the garden) and orange (from South Africa via Morrisons!) wine soon to follow.
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