Negroni

Original oil on panel, 12" x 12".

I might just keep this one. The color of this drink is simply amazing, even though we cut back on some of the sweet stuff in our recipe. And I had yet another beautiful art deco wallpaper pattern to make me crazy inspire me. 

The Negroni is one of Tom's signature drinks, but as always I started with a recipe from out in the world. Only subtle adjustments were required, but in the end you could actually taste the gin, which, around here, is considered to be a good thing. 

While we enjoyed our last Negroni, we dove into Teya's newest recipe find: a vegetarian version of Bebimbap, accompanied by delicious vegetarian kimchee. (Yes, to the dismay of Tom and Paul, Teya and I are—you guessed it—vegetarians.) 

Here are her recipes, and they were good!

Oh, and at the risk of repeating myself... 

GUESS WHAT!

Since Mixology has pretty much taken over my daily painting blog, I have given it a blog of its own. New drink posts, old drink posts, book info, release party info and more details about recipe tests can all be found at:

MixologyArt.blogspot.com

Prohibition

Original oil on panel, 12" x 12".

None of us had ever had a Prohibition cocktail before. But with a name like that, how could it not be in a book of vintage cocktails? In fact, I was so sure that it needed to be in the book, I painted it untested. The recipe did sound pretty good, after all. And we were behind on test nights, or I'm getting faster at painting, or something.

Anyway, I wanted a real 1920s feel for this, so I googled art deco wallpaper patterns and hit the jackpot. This was not an easy pattern to paint, but I loved it and did it anyway. Really happy with it in the end. So happy that I went to T & T's house and declared that by the end of the night, everyone in the room MUST like this drink. Including our unsuspecting guest testers, their new neighbors Scott and Nancy.

Fortunately, everyone did like it. To the point that for only the second time, we left the original recipe alone. Sadly, that meant we only got one, but we still had work to do.

GUESS WHAT!

Since Mixology has pretty much taken over my daily painting blog, I have given it a blog of its own. New drink posts, old drink posts, book info, release party info and more details about recipe tests can all be found at:

MixologyArt.blogspot.com

Corpse Reviver

Original oil on panel, 12" x 12".

Death, Gin and Lemon Juice, Part 2: we brought ourselves back to life with the Corpse Reviver. Actually the Corpse Reviver 2. The recipe tests always start with a recipe straight out of a book or the internet, then we tweak it to taste and I rewrite. The Corpse Reviver 2 recipe came from the Savoy Cocktail book, and for the first time ever, everyone agreed the drink could not be improved. It was perfect!

Given the zombie-ish name, I wanted a zombie-esque look for the painting. The startling green of the Absinthe made it pretty easy, along with the day-glo depression glass. A floating chunk of orange skin always looks sort of creepy too, although here it looks a bit like an egg. Which would also be creepy.

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Sunshine Daydream

Sold.

I'm just back from the Sausalito Art Festival and the Artist Trust Edge program, and it seems like I've been gone forever. I'm so ready to dive into the last batch of paintings for Mixology!

In the meantime, here is one of a few pieces I brought back from Sausalito, and it needs a home! It's an original pastel, all matted and ready to frame. The photo looks a little odd---I forgot to photograph it before I matted it, so you can see the edge of the mat and a bit of shadow.

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Martini

Original oil on panel, 12" x 12".

First of all, I owe a big Thank You to our friends Richard and Kate Vander Wende. They graciously hosted Martini and Vesper night. I was a bit nervous about testing these recipes, since I have never particularly enjoyed martinis. But now all that has changed.

Here's how Richard did it: he chose the gin well (Sun Gun Club Gin). He set a bottle of vermouth on the counter, shook the gin with ice, poured it into glasses, and garnished with a delicious Picholine olive. Perfection. We did try a version where vermouth actually went into the glasses at about a 10:1 gin to vermouth ratio. It was slightly different, but no one could really see the point.

There are those who say that a Martini must contain vermouth to qualify as a Martini. But there are many creative ways to handle this… Richard's proximity method is one. You might also hold up the bottle of vermouth so that light shines through it onto the drink, look at the vermouth from across the room, or just catch its reflection in the shaker as I've done here. 

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Embassy

Original oil on panel, 12" x 12".

One September I went to Boots vegan bakery and lounge with a friend. It was the first cool day in a long while, and I asked the owner, Alison, to make me a drink that "tastes like Fall." I've known Alison long enough to know she would pull it off, and she did not disappoint.

The drink she made was the Embassy, and it was about to become my new favorite drink. The Embassy is richly layered, warming and a bit spicy. Basically, Fall in a glass. It has three different liquors and liqueurs, plus citrus and bitters.

As I debated how to represent so many ingredients, I had a stroke of luck. Raising the Bar, a vintage travel trailer filled with old-school barware goodness, appeared in my neighborhood. Just inside the door was a fantastic set of multicolored cordial glasses, three of which appear here with dark rum, Cointreau and brandy.

To top it all off, the fall theme gave me the perfect excuse to use some leftover wallpaper from my parents' old house. All of this added up to a fun challenge, and I'm happy with the result.

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Manhattan

Original oil on panel, 12" x 12".

This one has been a long time coming! In an earlier post the Angostura bottle became a bottleneck (literally?). No Manhattan painting could possibly be complete without a vintage bottle, so weeks passed as various prop parts arrived and assembly commenced. 

The final bottle looked pretty good, except… while matching the original in size, it dwarfed the glassware. For an ingredient you basically look at from across the room while mixing the drink, the proportions were all wrong. The solution: move the bottle just out of frame and paint its reflection in the mixing cup.

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Old Fashioned

Original oil on panel, 12" x 12".

This one gave me fits---not so much the painting as the set up! The plan is to include every ingredient for every drink. There's not a lot to this one, so it seemed simple enough. The problem came with the bitters. My recipe uses Peychaud's, and the bottle dwarfed the glasses. So, I bought a tiny bottle the same shape and added a fake label. It looked silly yet dull. Luckily I had also picked up a pale purple bottle that was a miniature of my "soda" bottle. It shows the beautiful color of the bitters, and the repetition of shapes was a bonus, too.

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Margarita

Margarita. Original oil on panel, 12" x 12".

This weekend my husband Paul made his Top Shelf Margaritas for the second of many tasting parties. The recipe dates back to his bar tending days and is pretty much perfect. Our friends Tom and Teya hosted, and made two beautiful paellas to go with the drinks. (Below is a photo of the vegetarian one in their beyond-cool mid-century oven.)

The painting required a lot more prop wrangling than I would have expected. Once I finally got started, though, it came together pretty painlessly for as complex as it is. Paintings for the book will become available after the book release this fall.

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Waiting

Sold.

Original oil on panel. 8" x 8".

Today I intended to paint the "Manhattan" piece for the book and SQUIRREL!!!

The Manhattan recipe includes Angostura bitters, which are great, but no great shakes bottle-wise. I was pondering this when my husband found a photo of a vintage Angostura bottle. Well out of my price range on ebay, it was so cool. Shaped like a light bulb in frosted glass, it sported a long neck and a metal pour spout. I decided a vintage Manhattan painting would not be complete without at least a reasonable facsimile of this bottle. Now I am waiting for my cheap knock-off bottle to arrive, so…

In the meantime I painted Waiting with the props I already have, plus one I picked up last night. I thought my new skinny glass was perfect to show off the deep red Sweet Vermouth. I love how the lit part echoes the color of the cherry. I had fun keeping this one super loose, in contrast to the somewhat tighter pieces for the book.

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Fresh Mix

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Fresh Mix. Original oil on panel, 8" x 8".

Happy with this. I finally ran out of 6" x 6" panels, and moved on to one of the 8" x 8"s I had made. It was nice to work a bit bigger, and it was getting to be time. Had a much better go at the ice here, too. A combination of careful arranging and less-is-more seemed to be the key. The toughest parts: the measuring end of the bar spoon, and taking the photo. This one really wanted to glare!

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