A Harvest for Your Palate & Palette
Adam Blue with an excerpt from An Organic Palette
Adam and I once built a gigantic retractable shade structure for a festival. While he gracefully painted lotus blossoms, I clumsily dropped a 1” sheet of plywood on my foot and then tried to image blossoms in place of crushed metatarsals on the x-ray. This tack did not erase the damage, but to this day, when I contemplate my left foot and its lasting limitations, I see beauty as much as I feel pain or am frustrated by fused bones where fluid joints should be. I dance and walk crooked, but I dance and walk on.
Post-festival, Adam and I swapped stories, revealing that, as with the pre-festival build, he’d experienced one available facet and I, a wholly other, as if we had attended completely separate events. Divergence called to mind something about beauty and the eye of the beholder, something about perspective, and it prompted a little thread about the potential of shifting lenses, which continues to wend its way through my art, cooking, life, and well, most things. What if we can transform our experience, and the world with it, by seeing differently and acting with changed vision?
This week on FED, Adam plays with this potential—with varieties and variations of engagement and experience—via color and hue, light and shadow, time and season. He encourages us, in the process, to contemplate everyday objects as surprising and infinite worlds.
Much like I followed Adam’s vision to transform crushed metatarsals into lotus blossoms to be carried aloft to meet desert sun, to be retracted to reveal a dark sky’s worth of stars, FED invites you this week to refract your way through the day and find peace and inspiration in shifting perspectives.
Big love, Ashley
an Organic Palette excerpt
One day, while prepping the garden’s offerings, I was ruminating (ruminate: to think, and also to digest) on the curious homophones: palate and palette, a suite of sounds equally comfortable in the culinary and visual arts. The first, palate, meaning the roof of one’s mouth as well as one’s preference for a favorite set of flavors. The second, palette, calls to mind the wooden oval where artists mix their paints or the array of colors a graphic designer uses in a single project. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if my garden’s harvest could serve as the foundation for recipes that fed my body and my art? At that moment, An Organic Palette was born.
Radishes
Mesclun
Purple Pepper
Green Beans
Sun Gold Tomatoes
Triple Treat Pumpkin
Red Raspberries
…more about An Organic Palette
Most artists harbor obsessions beyond the work they do in the studio. For me, I love plants and I love to cook. I cultivated these dual passions through my education and work—biology in college followed by cooking in a variety of restaurants throughout my 20’s. For the past 18 years, I’ve made time for both by tending an organic vegetable garden, from which we feed our family and friends throughout the year.
Time in the garden binds me to the larger cycles of life as few other activities do. Because plants live by balancing the influences of the water, air, earth, and sun, gardening reminds me to observe how every day is different, and compels me to decide how I can help each plant thrive in relation to what we’re experiencing.
Stepping back to consider the whole, with every vegetable maturing at its own pace, I notice a cresting wave of vitality, a scrolling sequence of harvesting peaks that we surf across the season. In these ways, eating food from the garden brings time and place into our bodies, and makes us an expression of the here and now.
When I prepare a meal, larger thoughts like these and many of life’s other complications can fade into perspective. I try to work with a simple awareness of the flavors I seek and how the meal will look on the plate. Cooking can be relaxing and focusing. Standing in front of a cutting board filled with fresh vegetables is a simple pleasure. Handling the colors, smells, and textures is delightful. Exploring the ways each can be combined offers additional rewards on the table, one bite at a time.
For An Organic Palette—served up for FED as a sample from the larger project—I photo-documented many of the edible species I grew during the 2013 season. It was far from a scientific process. You’ll no doubt note that the quality of light is different in every picture. Sometimes I’d pick in the cool blue morning; other times, I’d pick as warm dusk fell, making the picture immediately before throwing the veggies in a pan. I processed the source photos that autumn and designed the book by the wood stove that winter.
As you browse through the images (browse: to scan casually with your eyes, and also to nibble on a variety of foods), you’ll find a portrait of a food and its accompanying hard-edged abstraction, created by sampling the colors in the source image.
To produce the color fields, I experimented with a number of the free, Internet-based, palette-generating tools available at the time. If you’re as obsessed with color as I am, there’s tons of cool software to explore. Ultimately, I used the following two resources: palettefx.com, a service that provided me with an initial set of options for the striped backgrounds, and colrd.com’s “image dna” option, which offered me a starting place for the grid of colored squares. I have no idea if they still exist today.
I hope you enjoy this playful project. If you appreciate contemporary hard-edge abstraction, this grounded take on the genre may suit you. If you’re an artist or designer and you like any of the palettes you see, by all means use them—not only are they all natural and organic, some are quite beautiful. And if you love food the way I do and you find yourself in the area, let’s eat!
FED is a participant-supported publication and community. Free subscriptions are a gift to all from other readers, contributors, and the editor. Paying subscribers both get a gift and give a gift by first, receiving their free subscription from the community and then, passing the gift on to others, via upgrade, in one great circle of giving and receiving.
All are welcome at the table, and together, we co-create and sustain community.
For more goodies…
Learn more about Adam and FED’s entire Summer 2024 global crew of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople, and be sure to check out all the tasty morsels we're serving up this season plus Adam’s Blueberry Sherbet recipe, which drops Thursday, 1 August.
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