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.