Yes, he is real. This is my really, really, ridiculously good looking cat, Mocha. It's only the second time I have painted him, which in retrospect seems weird.
He's all fluff, so concentrating on his face seemed like the way to go. At first, I was frustrated with the whiskers, but I started to like the messy look of them—much like Mocha's whiskers IRL.
He has his own Instagram account, although he's pretty lazy about posting to it.
So, what does a chicken have to do with cocktails, you might ask?
Surprisingly, there is a connection. This particular chicken, whose name is Flo, loves to sit in a chair with her people on the front porch during cocktail hour. She was doing just that when I took the photo I used for painting reference.
Flo is a retired chicken that I "rescued" when her original person, my friend Teya, wanted to get another batch of chickens after the first group stopped laying. Now Flo enjoys things like arugula and popcorn while hanging out with her new friend Ché, the Portuguese water dog. She is every bit as intelligent, inquisitive and disapproving as she looks.
I had so much fun painting her, I suspect she and her animal friends will begin to take over this blog. I've apparently become kind of a lightweight when it comes to painting cocktails. I need to mix in some other things to avoid getting sick of them!
Here's Flo with me after getting her ear infection treated:
The Brooklyn Manhattan is apparently a hot trend in drinks right now. Or maybe three years ago; it's hard to tell with things you find on The Interwebs anymore. Anyway, I don't care, I just want one most of the time. It's a delicious combination of rye whiskey, dry vermouth, maraschino liqueur, Ramazzotti Amaro, and two kinds of orange bitters.
This is my first attempt at painting this lovely mixing pitcher. My loose approach doesn't do justice to the three cut bands around the top. I'm sure it will get another chance to show off soon, though, so no worries.
On a recent trip to Portland, Rick and I visited a favorite cocktail spot from when he lived in the city. It's a hotel bar with a perfectly preserved mid-century vibe, called the Driftwood Room. Everything is spot on, down to the original(?) menu covers. The walls, made of hundreds of strips of interwoven dark wood, had recently been taken down, steam cleaned and replaced in their exact spots from before.
The Driftwood Room is a place where it appears nothing will change, ever. Yet, when we arrived, the bartenders were more than a little excited to show off a new addition to their repertoire: an absinthe fountain which they carried from customer to customer, enthusiastically explaining the correct process of serving and consuming absinthe.
Of course, we tried it. Neither of us is much into licorice, so the flavor was challenging. This in no way stopped me from buying my own absinthe fountain, just to paint. It's almost like the one at the Driftwood Room, except mine has wings.
I've noticed that sometimes when I order a drink that has cherries for garnish, the first drink will come with one cherry and the second drink with two. Although I don't always stop at two, I'm pretty sure I have never received a cocktail with three cherries. Three-cherry drinks appear only to exist on Pinterest. Too bad, that is.
Let's pretend this drink came from some mythical Pinterest bar.
This is the time of year when the golden hour and cocktail hour happen at the same time. And here in eastern Washington, it is finally warm enough to enjoy the beautiful, slanting golden light while enjoying a cocktail outside on the porch.
I love how the olives and the briny tones of the dirty martini mimic that warm, afternoon sunlight color, and turn the burgundy background orange. Sometimes these simple compositions are the most fun to paint.
This one was fun! When I was in the thick of making the Mixology with a Twist book, tiki drinks started to make a comeback in some of the on-trend bars where I got my recipes. There is such a wealth of tiki drinks (and great props) out there, I toyed with the idea of making a third, strictly tiki book. By the time I was done making the book, I was ready to stop making books.
But, there were still tiki things to hoard. This glass is new and has been waiting to model for a painting for almost two years. The little jade tiki god picks are mid-century and were a perfectly thoughtful gift from an old friend. The drink is a Mai Tai.
I loved painting the face on this guy. His little whiskers(?) were especially fun. I'm sure we will be seeing him again in the future.
This beautiful book has been laying around the house for years, and it never occurred to me to paint it. Then once I started painting it, of course, I wondered what the hell I was thinking. The cover is so busy! But in the end, that helped rather than hurt. After struggling with the title lettering, I started putting in all the frilly green stuff, and it seemed to come together.
The drink happens to be a Corpse Reviver 2. It's a favorite classic recipe included in my own first illustrated cocktail book, which is not nearly so fancy as the one in the painting.
I'd forgotten how fun olives are to paint. Not that I've painted a lot of them. I rarely paint martinis, even though people love them. They don't have any color! For some reason, it hadn't occurred to me until now to make a dirty martini. That little bit of brine adds just enough haze to the gin* to give it some contrast.
It's been fun the past several days to see how my painting has progressed. Back at the beginning of the Mixology project, it took months for my painting style to simplify and loosen up. This time, the abstraction settled in far more quickly. I'm sure it will come and go depending on the subject matter. But the looseness of this piece works for me. Especially in the olives and cocktail pick.
I think this martini might star in more than one painting this week.
*don't worry, no actual gin was wasted in the making of this painting.
While I may have stopped painting drinks for a few years, I never stopped hoarding props. After the second book printed, a pub in my neighborhood started serving drinks in these cool vintage Luminarc coupes, a set of which they found at a garage sale for a dollar or something. This never happens to me for some reason, maybe because I don't go to garage sales? I think that might be part of it.
Anyway, with a little research, I found my own set on Etsy. They were more than a dollar. But I love them! And at last, one has starred in a painting. It made a great subject, with its graceful shape and just enough detail in the cut glass to be interesting. The Prohibition cocktail was the perfect color to go with the backdrop I randomly collected a year ago, also while not painting cocktails.
My mom always found the coolest stuff. I could never help but hang on to even the littlest scraps of paper, the cards, the gift bags, and pieces of ribbon. Now, all of those things have taken on an extra level of preciousness. Case in point: the six-inch-wide piece of tissue paper with block-printed green swallows. For months I've carefully protected it from harm, with no actual idea what to do with it.
Paul also found cool stuff, but instead of buying it, a lot of the time he would just point it out. "Here's a link to a website with some cool cocktail glasses/vintage sewing machine/etc." After he was gone, part of my extensive retail therapy was to buy those things for myself and pretend he sent them.
When I put this still life together, I didn't even think about the combination of glass and background until after it was done. I just liked the combo of mom's tissue birds, and Paul's cocktail coupe find. I guess I made a subconscious tribute to my people. Or at the very least, my hoarding paid off.
I can't say I've always wanted one of these old art deco shakers with the beautiful translucent bakelite handle and knob, but I've definitely coveted them for a few years. Trouble was, they are spendy. Not that this always deters me, but I have my limits.
Everybody's grieving process is different. Retail therapy is a big part of mine, so I spend a goodish amount of time looking online at things I don't need. Sometimes it pays off, like when I found this magnificent specimen at about a third of the usual price. The reason: his hat was perched at a jaunty angle, which was not its original condition.
Within about two minutes of the shaker's arrival, the knob was off, and the lid was upside down on a folded dish towel, being lovingly tended to with a hammer. Weirdly, it worked.
I couldn't wait to tackle this new challenge. Before painting, I tried every background I had at my disposal and landed on the same one I used yesterday. Go figure. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Feels like I'm getting my groove back a bit.
It doesn't help that I chose to paint the most complicated new pieces in my prop cabinet, I suppose. But anyway, being that this is the first post in my new blog, I probably should explain a bit.
In 2016, I stopped painting cocktails after finishing my second book, Mixology With a Twist. Then I did something completely different: I switched mediums and subject matter, creating large-scale enamel works of animals. I got into a gallery I'd wanted to be part of for years, the enamels sold, and I got a two-person show scheduled for November 2017.
In August of 2017, everything came crashing down.
My husband and best friend Paul was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. His first chemo treatment landed him in the hospital for three weeks. He never got to have a second chemo treatment. I lost him on the last day of September 2017. His world ended, and so did mine.
Somehow, probably just to make him proud, I managed to get into the studio and make a few new pieces for the show. But circumstances required that I start working at the brewery where we were part owners, and that's all I had in me. Widowhood is not a good source of inspiration or energy. Getting up in the morning is a win.
Then, in February, my mom had a stroke. She had just worked out at the gym, then gone home and shoveled snow. The next morning, she was gone. I lost two of the three most important people in my life in five months. My amazing dad and I now had the worst possible kind of bond. We've helped each other muddle through the best we can.
Still, everything is upside down. The brewery takes up my days, and the enameling studio is slowly turning into an Airbnb. But little by little, with the help of a sweet new man in my life, a spare bedroom in the house has been turned back into a tiny painting studio. And today I finished my first tiny painting. Right now, that's all I have space for. And I'm a bit rusty.
