The Three Cooks

When I was in school at The Art Students League I painted a different figure every week. That is the League way: your class is assigned a model for the week; the monitor sets a pose; you grab the best spot you can and that is what you paint for the week. Some weeks we had a nude, some weeks a clothed figure and some weeks a portrait but always one figure. Alone. Truth be told, in those days I had my hands full with just one figure - it was hard enough to get the nose in the middle of the face and keep the paint on my palette from turning to mud without having to deal with more than one figure at a time. But after I left school I started to think about how to put figures together: my ideas for figure paintings always seemed to involve a scene: the first ones I did had two or three figures, the next ones had five, then seven and now I've stopped counting. It doesn't matter because no matter how many figures I put in a composition the building blocks are single figures, groups of two or groups of three.

The three cooks are at the heart of this painting and I have spent a lot of time figuring out just how I want them to relate to each other and to the overall composition. I call the figure on the left the Salter because she is sprinkling salt into the soup while glancing at the Taster for guidance. The lifted arm of the salter is the central gesture of the painting; the gateway into its world. Its shape is echoed by the taster's hand as she lifts the wooden spoon to her mouth; together they form a series of archways drawing the viewer deep into the painting. On the right the Sous Chef scrapes carrots (or are they onions?) into the soup with a decisive gesture that brings the viewer back to the center, to the steaming pot of soup.