Art for Gastronomica Magazine

Gastronomica called and wanted me to illustrate a story about pranks. Pranks chefs and sous chefs play on each other. A couple of approaches seemed to work. A plain funny drawing of chefs playing tricks––I drew something inspired by the MAD series Spy vs. Spy, sly looks, furtive cooks lighting matches in each others' cooking clogs. Another part of the story was about the phony equipment requests chefs send the new guy in search of. That's the idea that gelled. It required drawing a number of specialized tools that don't exist, never a problem for me. I think it turned out rather well. The art direction was by the excellent and seldom mischievous Frances Baca. Look for this art in the forthcoming issue. There are several articles in it that I plan to read over lunches this week...

Home on the Range

I did this art for Bon Appetit a few years ago, and since then have written a couple of things for David Leite's blog, Leite's Culinaria. We have this same Viking in our kitchen, so I suppose the art is a bit of a self portrait. Ours was not carried in sherpa fashion.

Food Art

I used to do quite a lot of food illustration and I miss it. Makes me a little hungry just thinking about it. I don't know when it tapered off exactly. Maybe I didn't promote myself enough in the category. Do I eat less adventurously than I used to? Probably that too. Here's something from ten years ago. My style hasn't changed much. I still need to remind the rational side of the brain to ignore proportion and common sense. This would be much less interesting if he were frying a normal-sized fish in that little pan. An illustrator's job is to create things you don't see everyday.

A Modern Kitchen

I did this drawing for This Old House magazine. The article was about a Kitchen of the Future that had been on display at RISD. The magazine might have wanted to use photography but the exhibit had been taken down, and all they had was a snapshot of it. Luckily the snapshot was enough for me to work with. The resulting image has the offhand charm of a sketchbook drawing and provided a nice contrast with the photography that usually dominates shelter magazines.