Gestural Drawing

Seized with the desire to make a decent meal for my brother, who will be here this weekend, and practice drawing, I decided to make a slow cooked bolognaise sauce. And do some quick "gestural" drawings while things browned and simmered. Gestural drawings should be done very quickly and without taking the pencil from the paper, so I decided to draw my beloved teakettle, n olive oil pitcher and a salt shaker that were right by the stove.

The gestural drawings weren't quite as quick as they should have been, and I burned the meat. My mother always told me that if something goes wrong with a dish one is making, there is always some way to save it, and the same has been said for making art, so I soldiered on.

The the tea kettle is a triumph of Italian visual design, but like many things Italian the practical design is a bit lacking. The little bird gets too hot to touch, but has to be removed in order to pour out the boiling water….a house sitter once burned up the little bird, and our online inquiries yielded a nets that they were closed for the entire month of December for the Christmas vacanza. In due course, we were directed to a store in San Francisco where the man pulled a cardboard box full of birdies from beneath the counter, and we all rummaged through it until we found a red one.

I picked out the most badly burned bits from the bolognaise, and the rest simmered into a rich and delicious sauce which I will put into lasagne.

The gestural drawing is all about spontaneity , so presumably there is nothing to fix….