This is the new idea for the three cooks. A few weeks ago I was invited to a wassail/house- warming party by a friend who loves to cook. Her new kitchen has a cooktop on an island and she had a big pot of wassail brewing when I arrived. Pay dirt. I spent the evening watching her stir the pot and chat while everybody at the party tasted and made suggestions. The next day I knocked out the little scribble on the bottom; a few days later I took the idea further with the sketch below. The new composition feels right; this is the one.

I'm back. Thanks to the miracle of my new studio (photos over at On the Easel) I am working on the Feast again. I find if I drink a cup of coffee at 9:00 I can work on drawings in the studio at night for a couple of hours even if I have been painting all day; afterwards I am tired enough to sleep despite the caffeine.

I tacked up 5 or six sheets of paper on the big wall in a continuous line. I wanted to start sketching out ideas for the whole Feast - not just Soup, which is what this blog has primarily covered - but also the transition into Baking; I am beginning to see the outlines of Chopping. Almost immediately I went off the rails of Grand Design and started delving into the particular sections and ended up using the lay out as a place to think instead of as a scroll. Work plans are made to be broken; I don't honestly think I have ever adhered to one.

The important thing is that I started to think about the Chopping section which I believe to be at the very heart of this piece. There are so many layers to it: violence, creativity - blood and death - and also the Zen (I think) idea of the slap of awakening, reality vs. illusion...these associations flood me every time I cut up a chicken; they are the driving force behind this painting, the knock that must be answered.

This the beginning of the next painting in the series. No title yet, but it will have a lot to do with baking. At first I thought this series would consist of three paintings: one making soup, one baking and one the feast itself, but the more the whole idea takes hold of me the bigger and more complex it gets. I don't know how big the series will be but at the moment it seems that this piece will be about batter: eggs, butter, flour and whipping it all together; I want to do another just about bread, one on cake - and that is just baking. After that there must be a section on meat, knives and blood.

As readers of this blog know, the first painting, making soup, is barely sketched out so it may seem odd to be starting the second, but I needed to do it as the ideas were tormenting me. These two pages of sketches are the product of three or four days in the studio with a mirror and some costumes and props.

In case anyone is wondering why this entire project seems to be going so slowly for the last few months, the answer is simple: I have a show coming up in September at Tilting at Windmills gallery where I show in Vermont and this means I have to produce work that might sell as opposed to spending my days moving figures from one side of a composition to another. I agonized a bit over whether or not to do the show as I was deeply involved with this piece and hated to drop it, but common sense won out. If you are living on your painting sales you just can't turn down a show at a good gallery and although my figure compositions sell extremely well I still can not afford to drop everything and just work on this project for the next three years, which is about what I think it will take to complete it. I'm not too unhappy though: I'm excited about the work I'm doing for my show (which can be seen on my other blog On The Easel) and I'm keeping this project going by working on the sketches intermittently. Come the fall I'll treat myself to a few months of uninterrupted work on it.

I think I'm pretty much finished with this study for now. There are still things I could do to it: I need to tone down the thalo green with some red washes and I'm not quite happy with the woman on the right. In the previous state she had a little hitch in her left hip that I loved as it gave the whole figure a subtle sexy swing. I lost it when I tried to develop the figure more. Arrgh. Thank God for this blog: at least I have a record of it and with any luck I can get it back in the next study.