042 tuesday november 9
the soup room / crow poem / vegan pot pie / things i've been putting off
it’s tuesday. you are sitting in a little room looking at a little screen.
this weekend was the first one i’ve spent completely in town in a while. it didn’t feel that way, though - it felt like i hadn’t left in weeks. like i’d just been kind of floating around portland for an indeterminate amount of time in between trips. even though it’s been one week. i wonder if that’s a sign of a sustainable pattern.
when you start at this job they tell you about your health insurance. they tell you about your dental insurance and your vision insurance (separate from health insurance.) you get a packet of glossy paper full of smiling ethnically diverse people at various stages of life. they are smiling because they just learned about the various co-pay and premium structures of the health insurance, dental insurance, and vision insurance plans they have been presumably offered. they are happy to look at a little table and drag their finger down the left side until they see “office visit (standard)” and they are even happier to drag their finger across to the right to the column marked “in-network” and see that their co-pay in that instance would be twenty dollars.
they also tell you about your paid time off and how much you get. at this job you get it all at once up front, you don’t have to accrue it, and they make a little joke about how you shouldn’t take it all at once up front because if you get sick later in the year you’ll be all out and then it can get a little messy, ha ha ha. in fact you know the person to which they are referring with this little joke, and it did get kind of messy. you don’t think the person at the kernel of this anecdote was going “ha ha ha” at the time but it’s been long enough now, no harm no foul, everyone’s OK now.
they tell you in a little bit less of a joking way that although your PTO is yours to do with what you will, you should not use it to take a series of three-day weekends for an extended period of time. ha ha. but really, that’s not what it’s for. it’s not for taking every Friday off until your PTO runs out in order to drive four to six hours to some new little corner of the woods, some new little bend along the coast. don’t do that! that’s not what it’s for.
1. painting
it’s another in the series of interesting types of rooms you could find yourself snoozing in, if you were lucky. in this room there is a lot of soup being made, but there’s still a cozy pile of blankets and cushions you can tuck yourself into and let all the burbling and bubbling lull you to sleep.
initial sketches and refined linework. in some ways this is an iteration on all the versions i’ve done before. so there are some pitfalls i am conscious of (and surely some that i am not conscious of that i will stumble into anyway.) one of these is setting up the composition so that there isn’t dead space where there shouldn’t be. part of the fun of these is the little stuff going on in the crevices and margins and backgrounds.
base colors. i’ve done mostly greens and golds before, and i do love that general palette. but i wanted to try something else.
after the base colors, i put on an overlay wash to adjust the tones more globally, and then flattened all the color layers so i could just paint over them again with “solid” paint. i mean it’s digital paint so. not that solid. but basically picking the colors from the spectrum that mostly already exists, and applying paint more-or-less opaquely, rather than building up more and more layers of overlays getting blended in different ways.
adding some actual purples and blues in here, and going through and overpainting, nudging, refining, etc. at this point i have pretty well slipped from my earliest intentions toward the painting portion of this project. the drawings don’t get started until Sunday or Monday, really, which does not give me as much time to put things down and revisit as maybe i initially hoped. if you go way back to the beginning, the first two paintings are really more of the caliber i was hoping the rest of these would be. do you think this is a me thing? do you think this is an external factors thing?
i’m taking a drawing class right now, it’s called “intro to drawing” or “introduction to drawing” or something like that anyway and it’s taught by this funny guy who i think runs a whole drawing and painting instruction studio by himself down in southeast portland. i’m taking it because i wanted to get better at drawing people, human beings, and i thought some kind of slightly formalized education might be a better approach than whatever you’d call the extremely half-assed slipshod approach to the rest of my art. and i thought maybe it would be a good way to meet some new people. and if you want to take “intermediate drawing” you have to take “introduction to drawing” first so even though, being completely honest with myself about my skills, i did think probably “intermediate drawing” would have been a good starting point, that was not an option available to me.
having not taken a formal art class since maybe 2010, i had no idea what to expect but i don’t think it was this. a big part of this guy’s whole “deal” is that drawing should be fun, it should not feel like work, you should draw in whatever manner makes you excited about drawing or at least not bored by it, you should discard your impressions and assumptions, you should work through all the art-related baggage that piles up on us since childhood. it sounds kind of cheesy and it is cheesy. but being cheesy is not the same thing as being bad or ineffective. macaroni and cheese for example is good, and, i would argue, very effective.
the “just do whatever it takes to not be bored when you’re drawing” thing sounds very obvious in retrospect but is not something that i’ve been prioritizing much this year. with the exception of last week maybe. not a lot of just fucking around on the ol’ iPad and seeing what comes out the other side. usually i’ve been going in with a goal, a notion, some kind of vision, and in practice this means i have been going in with something against which to measure my efforts. and either find them lacking or arrive at a stopping point i can call good enough or, in some rare cases, find my efforts achieve or exceed the original vision.
i’ve been approaching “the art chunk” with a couple of main goals. primarily: do something every week. that’s the main one. at least make something every week. secondarily: spend some time on that thing, maybe more time than you would have otherwise. these two goals sort of overlap with the “just do whatever it takes to not be bored when you’re drawing”: you can make it a rule to do something every week, and you can make it a rule that you can’t be bored doing it. those two things work together. basically you would end up with a chunk of time set aside in which to fuck around, and if something came out of it, great. that’s not what i’m currently doing but the further along i get, the more appeal the idea has. anyway.
one big tweak to get to the final up above is changing the color of the linework and adjusting the blend mode. it gets a lot less aggressive in the final. also i added some steam.
2. poem
“crow poem” - winter 2021
all the peanuts i left out became soggy
the rain had something to do with it
maybe i could drop a few a little further down
maybe i could put up some kind of big flashing sign
maybe i could walk around the block, pretend to stop
and tie my shoe and let a few slip out of one pocketand stand up and make eye contact with one of them
and point up at my balcony and wonder what they think
when they see a man standing in the rain pointingand whatever comes next, well
i guess we still have months to figure that out
3. vegan pot pie
one of my all time favorite vegan food guys did a vegan chicken pot pie recently and it looked insanely good, so i decided to try it. i pretty well followed his method but i’ll walk through it anyway and talk about it. check his stuff out though. he rules.
here’s all the stuff, or most of it. celery, carrots, plant milk (i use Ripple - oat milk is actually very sweet for cooking, even if you get unsweetened. too much usually for savory stuff), vegan “chicken” broth, vegan “chicken” (pretty common these days actually and most of it is fine for this), vegan butter, frozen peas, flour, rosemary, shallots, garlic, and thyme + sage. not pictured: salt, pepper, white pepper, and “umami” seasoning which in this case i just got from trader joes. and also the puff pastry.
my cast iron was not big enough for this project
when the carrots and celery and shallots have been cooking in the butter for about 8 minutes, the garlic, herbs, and seasonings go in.
skipped some steps here because it’s hard to take a non-gross picture of pot pie sludge. but basically after the garlic + herbs + seasonings cook in for a couple minutes, you add the flour bit by bit, stirring to incorporate it constantly. when it’s all in, you slowly add the broth in the same way, stirring it constantly. then finally the plant milk. adding all the stuff slowly together it will get with the flour to make a thick sort of sauce the other stuff sits in. i mean it’s a pot pie. you get it.
i wanted to make one little one just to see if it would work. the “main” pot pie won’t have puff pastry on the bottom (too complicated / too much puff pastry but go for it if you want) but for this one, i just cut a square and smooshed it into a mini pie tin. then glooped some filling in there and folded it up.
i washed the top with “Just Egg,” a vegan egg substitute that’s great for scrambles and egg sandwiches and also fine for this i guess. you could prob just use vegan butter though. or olive oil.
for the “main” one i just put it into my biggest cast iron. no crust on the bottom like i said. it barely fit.
i used this layering method of puff pastry chunks not only because it looks fun but because it’s actually one million times easier to do it this way than to try and get your puff pastry to actually fit the top of the pan. at least in my opinion.
i could have been a little more aggressive with including some openings in the top, but nevertheless. with an egg wash on top like the other one it turns out great. and makes a shit ton of food, too. i’ll be eating this all week.
4. things i’ve been putting off
getting a new batch of little notebooks for 2022
opening my mail
organizing the weird built in desk that my mail and current batch of notebooks are piled on, and clearing it off a little bit
unpacking and setting up my record player, probably on the weird built-in desk that is currently occupied by notebooks and mail
getting new socks
getting new pants
figuring out what kind of clothes i actually like and taking the time to develop a thoughtful, personal slimmed-down yet versatile wardrobe befitting a young award winning architect but who’s also kind of a fun guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously but who does definitely take himself seriously enough to put some thought into his appearance
answering my uncle’s email
finding a wife
reading Lenin
reading any of those other guys you’re supposed to read
comprehensively updating, organizing, sorting, categorizing, purging, refining, and curating the entire digital aspect of my life, both outward and inwardly facing
getting a new phone case so i don’t keep poking holes in my fingers
getting a new pair of shoes
eating my vitamins
okay well i think that’s it for this week. hope everyone has a good one. see ya next tuesday. bye.
good list