And now for something different! Anyone who has ever visited Japan will smile at these colourful sandwiches made from assorted fruit and burrowed into a thick creamy mix with yoghurt between two slices of milk bread. One finds them all over Japan in various guises depending upon the seasons. Called Fuwa-Fuwa, (fluffy like a cloud) they are as beautiful to look at as they are yummy to eat.
And so the NYT recently did an article about a small place on the lower East Side called Izakaya that makes them for lucky New Yorkers living downtown, and there, the chef, and co-owner from Sapporo, uses Mascarpone instead of yogurt to make them even creamier. I confess that it isn't so often that I imagine myself meandering around New York but when I read about a place like this I want to immediately fly up there from Australia and parachute into the kitchen.
This photo above, which I clipped as a screenshot from the NYT, has been sitting on my desktop for a month or so, poised for me like an errant, exotic and bright-coloured stamp on a collector's desk. It seems to wait and wait for SOMETHING to happen to it, indeed, ANYTHING but to be stuck on the desktop. My desktop is the purgatory of colourful things, assembled in this nether world of flat space, timeless, awaiting me to do something about it, to take some form of action. Anything!
So, indeed, SOMETHING has happened to this image of a Fuwa-Fuwa, resembling a postage stamp. In fact, it's still happening, at least until I finish this painting which I began last week. By then, I can indeed say that something has happened, and it will be smartly relegated to the past tense as a finished painting. Whew.....!
It's another large one and crazier than anything I have attempted. I wouldn't normally post an unfinished painting except that this is so viscerally connected to the image of the Fuwa-Fuwa above. But I had not even associated this painting to it until I began writing this post today. But, as usual, one's Painting Mind always initiates a visual surprise when one is plugged into Painting Memory, 24/7. And in this case it comes out as a kind of weird circus of colourful circles. The mind works in mysterious ways. Go figure!
More to be revealed.
I enjoyed this article - thanks Chris! The painting is great! Have you tried sitting these two images side by side to see if when placed even more closely how they relate so nicely?
ReplyDeleteLike a sandwich ??!! Chris these last two works can be related to Tantric imagery...have look at Niki Durvasula's work..she will show soon at Joost van den Berg in London's Asian art week
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