Gelateria

I’m calling my newest painting Gelateria, pronounced jell-ah-ter-EE-a, which is where you can buy gelato*. Gelato is something you should eat while you’re in Italy if you want your entire concept of “good ice cream” to be ruined forever. Trust me: if you’ve never had gelato, you don’t know what good ice cream is. And I’m not bragging here. What’s happened to me is tragic. Ever since I’ve eaten this stuff, no American ice cream comes close to measuring up. I am doomed to be forever dissatisfied.

Plus it’s so beautiful! The Italians’ presentation of their gelato puts our ice cream shops to shame. You’re not going to see chunks of hard ice cream at the bottom of some big cardboard-y bucket in Italy.

No. You’re going to see voluptuous, swirly mounds of perfect-texture ice cream decorated with fresh ingredients and little name cards and dripping with sauces.

So that’s why I wanted to paint it. This is a big painting, around 20″x28″, and it took me a couple of weeks to finish (although last week was crazy around here; I think I had one good painting day). I started in the upper-left corner and snaked my way around to the cherry-topped behemoth in the lower-left corner. Here’s the painting at the end of Day 2.

I wish I would have taken more in-progress photos. Where was my mind? I must have lost it after painting seven Elenka dipping spoons (what are those called, exactly?).

Painting the chocolate sauce was so satisfying. I painted the vanilla ice cream first, with its blue and yellow shadows, and after it dried I topped it with fudgy brown paint, almost exactly the same way you might apply hot fudge to an actual sundae.

I knew the swirls and ridges in each flavor of gelato would be challenging but no worse than anything else I’ve painted lately. I painted the melon gelato a couple of days ago while Jeff and Melissa watched Rango in the living room directly below my painting table. I listened to my iPod in an attempt to drown out the movie’s beyond-obnoxious soundtrack, but I could still hear the movie’s explosions, stampedes, and, I dunno, volcanoes, earthquakes, and rocket launches roaring below me. I could also feel them through the floor. I have never painted under worse sonic conditions, but I was behind schedule on the picture and wanted to catch up. So that melon gelato was painted by one highly annoyed but stoic woman.

This picture concludes my 4-month painting spree in preparation for my show at Culver-Stockton College eleven days from now. CSC is in Canton, Missouri,a small town in the northeast corner of the state. More info about that is here:

http://www.facebook.com/ev?ent.php?eid=23135170690198?5

If you can make it, please come to my opening on August 25 at 7:00 p.m.! All of my new paintings and some of my older ones will be on display. I realize that most of my friends (a) live 200+ miles away, (b) are teachers just starting the school year, and/or (c) are parents of young children just starting the school year. But if you live in or are visiting the tri-state area and would like to look at a whole lot of my watercolors for free, I’d love to see you there! The show will be up until September 23.

*Plural of gelato is gelati, and I dislike the sound of that word so much that I had no other choice than to call this Gelateria, although that word kind of bugs me, too. No reason.

In animal husbandry news, Bun continues to thrive after her visit to the U of I Veterinary Teaching Hospital about a month ago. I’m so happy with her progress! I almost hate to say this because I don’t want to jinx it, but her procedure seems to have fixed her other problems, too. We’re managing her condition with meds and special food, and she seems so much happier. Here Bun is sitting at our dining room table, where apparently we have all kinds of magazines lying around. We were eating homemade sushi, which was relevant to Bun’s interests.

Another thing Bun is loving: watching water in the bathroom sink.

Quixote digs it, too.

Finally, earlier this week Jeff and I visited the Prairie Fruits Farm, where we purchased some goat cheese and their exceptional peach sorbet, which we’d rank right up there with Italian gelato but not quite as this was sorbet and sorbet is easier. While at the farm, we had a brush with goatness.