La Guli

As some of you may know, I have quite a sweet tooth, often baking my own treats, and just as often sampling the toothsome delights of New York bakeries and cafes. At the end of 2008, my friend Jen and I went out to Astoria to the La Guli Bakery to draw their adorable shop.


Not only are their baked goods top-notch, but they were very nice about letting us take up a table in their tiny bakery for few hours. They had so many amazing-looking sweets, but I thought the Baba Rums deserved some special attention!

More from Mystic

One of the high points of the weekend in Mystic was a meeting in the blacksmith's shop. It was a gathering of (mostly) men who are interested in blacksmithing. I appreciate the interest in bygone ways of doing things and lost arts. It's refreshing to find people that are still interested in crafting things by hand, as these people are, in our increasingly digital world. The physicality and the labor intensiveness of the work seem the exact antithesis of our digital present. At the same time, while so many of us are making out livelihood away from it, our physical being is still tied to that world, we still need, will always need things. Ships still need to be built, and not everything can be done by a machine, at least not yet. So here are two of the head blacksmiths, who host these meetings at the Mystic Seaport Museum, and teach others the craft.

Harlem

I spent some time drawing in the fish market, and this little boy and his mother were two of the highlights. He was excited to be in my drawing because he loved to draw himself. He showed me a number of pictures on his cell phone that he was planning to draw at home. He got so excited, in fact, that he sat down next to me to draw the lobster tank right there.

Chinatown

There's always something exciting happening in Chinatown. From the fish markets to the bakeries, there are a million people bustling around, jostling, shopping, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and more. Here's a view through a bakery window at some egg custards and coconut tarts, yum!

Angel of the Waters, Central Park


The fountain in the "heart of Central Park" commemorates the 1842 opening of the Croton Aqueduct, which was the first dependable supply of pure water in New York City. The original pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem was said to have had healing powers.
I was going more for the feeling of the fountain and Central Park rather than a straight forward drawing, although I tried to keep the original reason for the fountain in mind.

Dionysus Mural

Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, revelry, madness, and ecstasy is a perfect figure for artists since he's all about unbridled license and a freeing from the normal constraints of everyday life and civilization. The cult of Dionysus were the first to try to transcend the existence of the flesh. During the rites, the initiates of the cult were supposed to actually take the god into themselves - to become the god.

The theme of the mural was "change," and I wanted to depict something cyclical instead of a one-way transformation. Dionysus is called the twice-born god because he was born from both his mother and his father. His mother, Semele, asked to see Zeus undisguised, the same way he came before Hera. Zeus had promised Semele anything she wanted, so he reluctantly showed himself, in his least awful incarnation. Semele was immolated completely anyway, and Zeus couldn't do anything for her except to pluck Dionysus, then in utero, from her ashes. Since the fetus hadn't been fully brought to term, Zeus sewed him into his thigh, from which he birthed him a few months later. The death of Semele is on the left side of the mural, and Dionysus' birth is depicted on the right. In the middle is the ritual bacchanal (and death) of the god, who is sacrificed and resurrected yearly. Dionysus leads the procession of initiates, dancing in drunken ecstasy. The bull that is sacrificed stands in for the god. Strangely enough, Dionysus is both a celebrant and the sacrifice in the ritual.

Whew! So that's the story, here's the mural:

And some details: