Flavors 518

Every year at the museum where I work we take the interns on a field trip. Last year we went to Boston . This year we went down to Chester, CT to see Sol LeWitt's house, studio, and warehouse. We also had a fabulous lunch. LeWitt is great. I loved an exhibit of his work I saw on the roof garden at the Met in NYC in 2005. I loved the one at the Wadsworth Atheneum. I even made LeWitt cookies which depicted the one we have at my work. And I am sure we all love the installation that we be at MassMoca through 2033. He has a way of cheering up dreary spaces and making you think about the ways lines and shapes connect. His pieces make me feel inspired, like a deep breath of cold, fresh air.  It was really a great experience. We arrived at his house, and saw that he has a variety of very interesting outdoor sculpture around the grounds of a regular looking colonial style house in a normal looking neighborhood. Then we went inside. Every room was painted a different bright color on t...

I previously mentioned that I am auditing a class at the art conservation lab. Last week we took a field trip to the Empire State Plaza Art collection. I had never been down there before. Another blogger discussed the collection here . The conservator told us about all the awful things that have happened to these paintings, including vandalism in the 1980s. You can read an article about that event here . A man took a serrated steak knife to eight different paintings, sawed at them, pulled the canvas forward, and wrote on them in magic marker. It was at three a.m., the plaza police were off somewhere, and the only reason the man got caught was that he turned himself in the next morning. There were other incidences over the years with these paintings - kids lodging spitballs on them with straws from the nearby McDonald's, coffee spills, soy sauce packets sprayed on the Jackson Pollock , a Jazzercise instructor using a painting as the jumping off point for her exercise, kids climb...

I always look forward to President's Day because that means I usually get the Monday off after my birthday . This year, however, I am auditing a class at the conservation lab , so I ended up going into work anyway (it is a floating holiday for us). It is a fun class because I get to hear about all kinds of art related gossip, like how the people at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge put paintings where the pastry chef ended up burning them with his setting the cherries jubilee on fire. The conservators told them not to put the paintings near any food, so they put them above the boiling water of the coffee station, and five years later had to pay to get them fixed all over again. Also, The Clark's Bourgereau is getting conserved and every time we go it is a little different looking as the yellowed varnish gets removed gradually. Anyways, this class is making me tired as two days a week I get home at about 10:00 at night so I took today off. We had originally sampled some fo...

 I have previously made art history cookies. I even mentioned to my boss about making art history inspired cake pops for when our new director starts ( she suggested something more like this ). But now, check out these art history sandwiches! Very cool.

 Last week I posted about my plans for the staff cookie exchange and my art museum inspired cookies. I had watched a video online about painting fondant . I learned about fondant at a class I took at Bettie's Cakes .  I bought a huge box of it at a craft store. I also bought some gel food colors, and some vodka. I rolled out the fondant and cut it up in squares. The first batch I did I put too much vodka mixed in with the colors. This made them take forever to dry, and therefore the coloring was still wet while the fondant got a little hard. You want a little vodka (you can also use vanilla or lemon extract). It is not like a watercolor painting. You just want to add a very small amount to thin it a little bit, and prevent the color from globbing up. I also bought some brushes from the cake decorating section of the craft store.  This is my Edward Hopper's "Morning in a City". After they got a little hard, and I had a disastrous time trying to put plastic...