Day 21. Rainbow Cakes
Even as a kid, I always looked forward to eating Rainbow Cakes. This platter was the ultimate. Maybe the title should be Rainbow Cake Heaven… After all, can one ever eat too many rainbow cakes?
In case you are wondering, here’s the whole platter.
The backstory is going to surprise you. Rainbow Cakes is dedicated to my friend, Bob Mawson, who passed away in 2014. I regularly attended Bob’s meditation class in Tarrytown for a few years. Here’s a photo of the young Bob.
Since Bob was ordained as a Buddist monk in Thailand, Bob’s wife, Marcia, held a very spiritual memorial service run by the monks in orange below. I’m sure Bob would have loved it. It was memorable to say the least. All in white, Bob’s sons and wife spoke eloquently about his contributions to helping others as a healer and meditator around the world.
After the service was finished, the rainbow cake platter – an unforgettable image to this cake aficionado – magically appeared at the monks’ table.
I had intended to return to my comfort zone with a simple dessert painting for Day 21, after having a trying day yesterday when my egret painting failed. Total fail. I didn’t have time to recover since I hosted a woman’s group meeting at my house, and lost a whole day.
For Day 21, I was thinking about a single Oreo cookie, but no, I’m a glutton for punishment. In the end, I choose a complicated image, but cropped it so there were fewer rainbow cake pieces to paint.
I went ahead because I really wanted to try this, although I knew it wouldn’t be a piece of cake (pun intended). After all, I had already practiced a single rainbow cake in Plate of Cookies. Time went quickly while I was watching the inauguration, and I made major progress on the tri-colored cakes.
After dinner, I made them 3 dimensional, darkened the plate, and added in crumbs, my favorite item to paint (time for a cake?).
The pineapples stumped me. By cropping the composition, the amorphous pineapples shapes became prominent. The yellows of the pineapple and cake needed to be differentiated. It came down to the shadows to add interest.
Working on this reminded me of weaving. I went back and forth, in and out, hoping the pineapples would come together before the painting got too wet. I even printed out a larger image. This took a lot of patience.
At 1 am it hit me that we had a platter of fruit in the garage fridge with cut pineapple chunks. If only I had thought about this hours before! Studying these pieces helped, though they could be easily mistaken for cheese chunks.
The bottom line is that pineapple chunks are a challenge to paint so they don’t look like the yellow layers in the cake cake or cheese. I struggled and maybe it shows. My other pineapple experience was with Avocados, where I had to differentiate pineapple from mandarine oranges and mango. But these weren’t dominant items.
I’m not sure how successful I was with Rainbow Cakes, but I’m pleased I tried it. I have to control the impulse to keep working and fine-tune the cakes, and pat myself on the back for effort. Maybe I’ll come back to them later today (in my dreams…).
It’s fitting that these little cakes are commonly called rainbows which bring good luck. That’s how I felt when I met Bob. I’m lucky to have known him.
Thanks for coming by. See you tomorrow. Same time, same place.
