TIME TRAVEL

      Food is one of the most effective time machines invented by man. What other experience can take one to another place and time so effectively on so many levels as food. Sight, smell, and taste...even touch sensations are activated by the act of sitting down to a particular dish. Alex, my Macedonian born significant other, has an entire set of facial expressions that only activate when he talks about the food his Serbian grandmother used to make. When he describes the Gibaniza his mother has made all of his life his face melts into memories of the melange of homemade phyllo pastry and cheeses and eggs and cream and sometimes ground meat, leeks, or even spinach. He called me from a restaurant in Montenegro last year to describe the pork loin that was sitting on his plate, and even now when he talks about it I feel like I am there with him on a terrace festooned with kiwi and grape vines overlooking the Adriatic eating juicy, succulent , roasted pig. And I didn't even buy the plane ticket. But I think the most beautiful food memories are the dishes our moms and grand moms used to make for us. I have the good fortune to own the handwritten recipes from both of my grandmothers, and they both tell such beautiful stories of meals shared. My brother and I went with my parents every summer to Cold Water Lake in Michigan. We tumbled out of the back seat of our 1970 Volvo and ran for the chest freezer in the storage hall. In meticulously cleaned out plastic yogurt containers was our reward...a frozen mixture of coolwhip, walnuts, and cherry pie filling. Whoa. Nirvana. If I were to eat that right now I would time travel to a place of cold concrete floor under my feet, surrounded by life vests and fishing poles, dipping my spoon into my creamy cool whip dessert. 

      So for me, when I read a cookbook or hand written recipes, they are like a window to the past. They allow me to travel to another place or time. All of my paintings are a similar attempt. I create a visual experience that allows transport through time and space. The destination may be a memory, a feeling, an event...in the case where I am actually using cookbooks, booklets, and recipes, the experience is more guided. I am eliciting a "food memory time travel".  I am asking the question "What must this time have been like for the women cooking for their families and for those families forming memories around those tables?" And I do not in anyway think that all those memories were fond one - but simply human ones that are so very effectively elicited by sitting down to something to eat.