I have been blessed!

 

I have been blessed with gifts as both a visual and culinary artist.  I also have had the great fortune of studying and working with some of the greatest artists of the 20th & 21st centuries. Being in the right place and right time also contributed my wealth of experience in study and work with virtuosos of the culinary and visual art world.

 

Having witnessed emotion and passion, combined with craft, talent, skill, and technique merging to produce incomparable artistic beauty, to now what has come to replace the aforementioned attributes of artistry is a populist movement of emotional self-absorbance with not a hint of craft or discipline.  How did thought, passion, craft and talent become subverted to feelings, emotion and self-importance?

 

Art can still be qualified and quantified!  The philosophy of “if it feels good, it is good” does not cut it in the realm of art in a historical sense!

 

With the present new world view of the chef as rock star, in conjunction with the masses armed with cell phones, thus becoming “foodies”, and “gourmands” without technical background or experience, but being solely absorbed in technique and innovation for effects, without the power of taste, again becoming emotion over craft the arena of the culinary and visual arts.

 

Any serious connoisseur of the arts dedicates their life to the education of that chosen discipline; this is where thought and knowledge will always supersede the loosely bound tangle of emotions substituting for craft.

 

...But we mustn’t forget in our arrogance that beauty still rests in “the eye of the beholder”.