I haven’t been posting, but I’ve been keeping up the art— here are some things.
Tea canisters I covered in fancy paper.
Wall art—an experiment with a new Japanese brush.
Trying the J-RPG look in a Greekish mode. I love the wacky character designs in video games!
Here’s the queen of cups again, but in colour this time—I am experimenting with a new painting style.
I’ve lost track of the days I did stuff and forgot to upload, bah, so I’m just going to jump back in and not worry about that.
Once the water-seller saw a little boy at the fountain. It was the summer and the fountain was dry as bones, yet the boy was despondently pushing a little paper boat across the bottom of its pool.
So she tied up her dappled mare and sat down beside him. “You won’t sail very far on an ocean with no water.”
He looked up at her. “I wish it would rain.”
She giggled. “So do I, but let me tell you a story—it’s a secret! Don’t tell anyone else.” He nodded and leaned his head on her shoulder to listen.
‘Once there was a king in a kingdom with no candles. He wore a crown of keys and he’d lived for years without counting with his bright-voiced queen, who never stopped talking to him and whose words were so beautiful and wise they turned into light, cutting gracefully through the gloom. Together they ruled that kingdom with strength, courage, and enough foresight to at least guarantee a peaceful and prosperous reign for their heirs—they had seven sons and seven daughters—and if their heirs had learnt their lessons skilfully, maybe for their heirs as well.
But it was not meant to be, for one day the wazir came to the king and said, “I have read it in a book that the crown of keys is a key to human hearts; if you show someone the right key, then a lock will appear, and he who puts the key in that lock will have the love of that heart forever.”
The king immediately pulled a key from his crown, and by some inspiration, it was the key to the wazir, and he locked his heart then and there. There was a mountain-shattering sound. Then the wazir understood the import of what he had done and begged the king to lock no more hearts, to leave love well enough alone, but the king saw the look in the wazir’s eyes and the desperate fear in his face and he craved to see it again and again.
The king began to keep the crown in his lap when he held audiences, and he would quietly lock the hearts of those that came to see him, until all his family and staff and dukes and earls, emirs and khagans, beys and knights and nomad chiefs, most of the people of his kingdom, loved no one better than he, and he was always surrounded by the radiance of their desire.
But there was one key he could never find.
He could not find the key of the queen, and as the years unfurled, she began speaking less and less, and her song no longer illuminated the vaulted halls.
One day he asked her about it.
She replied, “Didn’t you have my whole heart, before? In its season, when it bloomed, wasn’t it beautiful?” ‘
The water-seller stopped there. “There’s an end to that story, but I think today is not the time to tell it.”
The boy nodded. “Can we go riding on your horse? I should like to see the other side of that dune there, and when we get there, we can see the other side of whatever is behind it.”
So, I started messing around with Tarot cards. This is a sorta divergent interpretation of the queen of cups.
Yesterday, we put this up:
There was all kinds of stud-finding and level-using and stuff involved. I felt very handy.
Two days ago, I left out a post; here it is. This is a quick, unstyled look at some food I was eating that day; I had a problem. No starch for my curry! (There’s broccoli rabe in there along with pan-fried eggplant and tons of Thai basil.) But I did have some potato-filled pirogy in the freezer. Perfect? No, but tasty.
Edited in a recipe for sea star:
Take an eggplant that’s not too big (Asian eggplants are what I cook with; only use half on one of the big European ones) and cut it into strips, maybe you want them about half an inch on each short dimension and an inch to an inch-and-a-half on the long side. If you’re using a big European eggplant, toss these strips with a tablespoon of salt and leave them in a colander while you do the rest of the vegetable prep, and come back to this when indicated. If not, then heat a nonstick frying pan on medium heat, add some neutral oil and warm that up, throw in the eggplant and toss immediately to cover all the pieces with oil. Now spread them out in a single layer and leave them alone for several minutes, until the bottom is golden brown. Salt to taste, toss them again, and brown again. Remove them from the pan and take the pan off the heat.
Take a handful of broccoli rabe (about the diameter of a broom handle or two, I’d say) and cut it up into more-or-less equal pieces. I know that this is really hard because stems and leaves are so different, but just try and get them to the same size as the eggplant bits. Oil the pan again, heat it to quite high, and flash-fry the broccoli rabe just so it has some crunchy browned bits but doesn’t lose its bright green colour. Take the pan off the heat again and dump the greens on top of the eggplant.
Cut up a roasted red pepper or two into strips of appropriate size, add to the other vegetables.
Get some red curry paste. It comes in cans at the Asian market. You need about, say, two tablespoons, which amount you can adjust to your taste. Get a can of coconut milk and keep it in a cool place.
Open the coconut milk. Important: Never shake coconut milk.
The coconut milk should have separated into two layers: A thick, stiff, creamy layer on top, and a thinner, watery layer on the bottom. Take like three tablespoons of the cream, and put them in your empty nonstick pan. It’ll slowly melt and sizzle; coconut milk is made up of water and coconut solids and coconut oil, and the cream is mostly oil. Stir in the curry paste and let it fry on medium-low heat. It will separate. This is okay! You want to slowly heat it and eventually it’ll turn into dark-red solids and bright orange oil. That’s what you want. Toss in two to four kaffir lime leaves and fry them until they curl up a little.
Once the curry paste and coconut cream have separated and the lime leaves are fragrant, stir in the vegetables and toss them until they’re well covered, then add the rest of the contents of the coconut milk can and stir it around till it’s all evenly warmed. Finally, add a handful or two of chopped Thai basil leaves, stir them in.
So, I recently acquired Amano, a collection of Yoshitaka Amano’s printmaking work.
I’ve been studying the way he draws his faces; they are really interesting, expressionless heiroglyphs.
There are some anatomy issues going on here, even after I did a little plastic surgery in Photoshop, but it was really refreshing and challenging to work in pencil again after so much time relying on ink, which is a much more forgiving medium for digital work.
When I was a child, in my village there lived a water-seller.
That’s what we called her because everywhere she went, she carried this great grey water-jar brimming with clear water, but she took no payment for it when she ladled it out for the men and women and children that gathered around her. At first we used to bring her coins, but she would refuse them, and then we would bring her fruits and sweets, and these she would take graciously and later pass them out to beggars and urchins, so after some time we stopped that. I always brought a handful of dates and figs even then, to share with whoever might be listening.
We really just came to be in her presence, to listen to her speak. Like a washer-woman from the slums or a potter in her studio, she never wore a veil nor headscarf nor painted her eyes, and she was not particularly young or especially beautiful, but in her tattered caftan she carried herself like a queen. The only jewelry she wore was a single red garnet lotus in her hair; it seemed like she could open and close its petals, because sometimes it was in full bloom, sometimes wilting, sometimes only a bud.
Sometimes she would just come to the well to fill her jar, and leave, but sometimes she would come there and sit on one of the benches or walls or borrow a stool from a merchant’s tent, and talk to someone about something. Then we’d all begin to wait for her to tell her stories. Finally she’d speak.
She pitched her voice to carry across the square, fill its corners and bounce off the high stone walls of the school on the other side, and say, “That reminds me of a story.” Her eyes would widen and flash side-to-side like she were sharing a secret, and as she spoke of love and fury it transformed her demeanor; I have lost count of the times she’s melted my heart with a look or shaken me to the soles of my feet with a glare of someone else’s anger.
Sometimes after she spoke, someone else would tell a story. One day, a man I’d never seen before came to the well to listen. I thought he may have been a madman, because a cloth was tied around his mouth so he could not speak, but after she told her story he untied it and told her his, and they walked together to the mosque to pray, and after that we did not see the water-seller any longer.
(I forgot to post my thing from yesterday; I’ll add it to my post for tomorrow.)
I saw cignoh’s post from earlier today and decided to try out the same thing.
Pictured are lemon-basil-feta pasta and kaeng ped curry with crab and lots of herbs. I think it’s really neat how the pasta becomes sort of beautiful and tasty-looking with exactly the same effects that make the curry look totally gross.
Today’s doodle, sumi and Sharpie. The fude acts in such a strange way, not like a Western brush at all.
So today I spent a while taking pictures of this thing I made and mucking with the color balance in Photoshop. At this point the digital image looks something like the way it looks in real life.
Today the water-seller was in chains. She sat in her cell, too tired to dance in her iron slippers, and trailed her fingers through the pools of mud that formed at the corners of the cold, dripping dungeon walls. The others in her cell—debtors, robbers, one fortune-teller whose fortunes were unfortunate—watched as the mud curled and hardened into fanciful shapes. The water-seller drew braided vines and stars and swooping, long-tailed birds across the walls and floors. She drew an angel whose hands and mouth were bound with ribbons of silk that flew across the walls, catching the feet of birds and the light of stars and choking the buds growing on the vines.
The fortune-teller said, “I know that angel, but he does not tie his hands. He is Nashira, the bearer of good tidings, and I will tell you his story…
In the beginning of the world every angel had its duty. It was the duty of Nashira to sing the anthem of the sun’s rebirthing as the fingers of dawn pushed back the darkness. It was its duty to announce the comings-and-goings of the Seven and other magnificent beings. So on and so on were Nashira’s duties.
At the descent of the angels, something terrible happened to Nashira. He did not follow the custom of other angels, and clothe himself in wings and radiance; instead he roamed the earth as a mortal prince and he said his name was Radjab.
Radjab once met a woman, a maker of clocks and clockwork toys. Her name was Jamileh. He admired her work, and spent much time in her shop, and made her teach him the art of clockmaking. She remarked on his wit and humour. They made things together and soon it was not just her shop, but theirs, and their fame spread far across the sea. They built a garden of clockwork flowers that opened and closed with the passing of hours, with clockwork birds that chimed the evening and morning, with a clockwork crane that stood and watched the clockwork fishes in their little garden pond.
They sat on the roof with a flask of wine and a book of verse; they rode their horses across the dusty dunes; they danced and sang at festivals, and to all the world they looked like the happiest pair of lovers that had ever lived.
One night, Jamileh said to Radjab-who-was-Nashira, “I love you.” He tried to say the same, because he loved her, he had loved her for a score of years and longer now, but the words went discordant and died in his throat. The only sound that came out was like a grinding of gears. He tried to say, “You make me happy,” or “I am yours forever,” or any of the other things that the heart moves men to say to those they love, but he could not.
Nashira’s wit was a terrible thing that happened to him, because when he came to the earth, the song had gone out of him, and he could not say anything true about his heart.
Jamileh said to him then, “If you cannot say anything to that, then do not say anything again in my house.” She threw him out, but her heart softened and she gave him a scarf to remember her. As he left her he tied it around his mouth as a gag.”
The water-seller nodded to the fortune-teller. “Thank you for your story. I will see you again soon.” She broke her chains, opened the cell door, and left.
