Keeping it Light

Cup of the Day #22
by Gwyneth Leech 2009
colored India ink on white cup

I am sitting in the front room of my 5th floor walk-up on West 47th Street between 9th and 10th. The air is clear and a fresh breeze is blowing in the windows, carrying the scent of irises blooming in the community garden a block away.

I am in digital mode today and another New York artist Ula Einstein is assisting me. Ula is being  objective and helping me to complete a delayed drawing project which involves scanning, manipulating and uploading 150 images to my website. To set us up I have made a pot of Scottish Blend tea, which she drinks black with honey and I take with just milk.

While we work we discuss our preferred art-making methods and materials. Making art on the go comes up. Time was I used a sketchbook, but for some years now I have been focused on the ubiquitous cardboard cup as my favorite drawing surface. Ula uses a wider range of ephemera and cast-offs in her stitched and burned artwork. Trader Joe coffee cans and the round aluminum skins that seal the ground coffee are useful to her, as are small odds and ends, such as napkins and balloons that she can carry in her bag. So, as she says, she always has something to work on while traveling from place to place. Ula's process is described beautifully in a recent article in Dvisible magazine, online here.

My mother Louise Leech, also an artist, made sculpture incorporating cast-off objects in her younger days, so I come by my impulse to recycle honestly. However, when my parents moved in 2004 from a large house they had lived in for 50 years, my sister and I cleared her basement work rooms. Out came broken umbrellas, candelabras, heavy picture frames, dismembered chairs and tables, trunks and boxes, bicycle frames, doors, and a chipped bowling ball, heavy as lead.

I think it was the bowling ball that finished me off. As I hauled it last of all up the basement stairs I resolved then and there to be an artist who travels light. Being inclined to paint on stretched canvas, I am still working to keep that resolution. But with cardboard coffee cups I am definitely on the right track.

Renewal IV

By Ula Einstein
mixed media sculpture installation

©Ula Einstein 2010

Dishing the Dirt

 

 

 Cup of the Day #19

Small Coffeebean Cup by Gwyneth Leech

India ink on brown cup, 2009

Not long ago I gathered with several other artists, writers, an actor and a musician to sort through some dirt. Literally.

We are the composting committee at Clinton Community Garden and we were opening up last year's compost bins. Soon a heaping wheelbarrow full of rich black organic material stood before us, surprisingly odorless and rich in the promise of fertile garden plots to come. We sorted through by the spadeful, removing avocado pits, corn cobs, little paper labels, stones, twigs and other dross that hadn't broken down. Then the precious compost was decanted into tubs ready for distribution.

In the process of shoveling and sorting I learned that egg shells, coffee grounds and tea leaves are all worth their weight in composting gold. Rich in nitrogen (and calcium for egg shells) they make superb fertilizer for a garden or planter and can be used directly on the soil, without needing to be broken down. Who knew?

On the other hand, the left-over honey comb from the garden's hive emerged these many months later as an undigested horror and had to be hidden inside a bucket for someone braver to deal with.
 
I have a plot here, about the size of a single bed, among a hundred such beds intensively and lovingly tended by us nature-starved city dwellers. I was on the waiting list for eight years before our family name came up. The plot has had many prior owners in the thirty year history of the garden so it has delighted me this Spring with a succession of surprises: daffodils, hearty tulips, sprays of violets and now a rich display of what I think of as Scottish blue bells. Wild hyacinth really. They carpet the woods near Glasgow in May and David and I used to trek out to see them anually when we lived there.

On these Spring mornings in New York City I like to come early and sit cross-legged on the brick path in front of my little plot, drink my morning tea from a cardboard cup and let my mind wander to woods and gardens far away.

Video still
Apis Millifera by Gwyneth Leech, 2008
with music by Martha Sullivan
taped in the Clinton Community Garden

View on Youtube here

How to Find A Great Cup of Coffee on 10th Avenue

 

 Cup of the Day #19

by Gwyneth Leech, 2010

Sumi ink and white-out pen on green printed cup

"Excuse me, is there a Starbucks on 10th Avenue?" This question from a bearded young man on the corner of 10th Avenue and 46th Street. Now that I think about it, I do not believe there is a Starbucks between 14th Street and 70th Street, practically the whole length of the Avenue. I direct him to several on 9th, but he is not satisfied with the need to leave 10th.

"Why don't you try Bis.Co. Latte?", I suggest. It is a half block from where we stand. Run by Holly DeSantis who lives right across the street from her shop, it has a full espresso bar serving Illy coffee and she bakes a wildly original selection of biscotti on the premises.  It isn't cheap, but neither is Starbucks. Plus, they serve the coffee in a china cup. If it's tea you want, they serve it in an attractive tea pot and matching cup.

"But is it a good place to read?"  Read! they have a bookshelf and magazine rack. You can read all day.

We parted ways and I walked two blocks to collect my daughter from school. On our way past Bis.Co. Latte a half hour later he was there seated at a table, coffee cup at his elbow, engrossed in a book.

We went to the playground to join the tumult of after school play. Grace ran off to swing on the monkey bars and I sat down next to my friend, Carolyn Montgomery - cabaret singer, mom, raconteur and woman with her finger on the pulse. She and her wife Lea have an excellent little bistro on 51st Street called Café Forant which I wrote about in a earlier post here.
We chatted about life, art, elementary school, the weather. It was a gray day of drifting petals from the flowering trees.
"You know,' she  said, "it was such a chilly day, I brought a bag of lattes with me to the playground".
I reacted in surprise. "Starbucks?"
"No, from the cafe. I just made up four lattes and brought them in a bag in case someone wanted a latte. Sometimes it's just nice to be able to say, do you want a latte?"
"And are they all gone?" I asked, laughing.
"Of course, I knew there would be at least four sleep-deprived mothers here."
How right she always is!

So if you are looking for good coffee on 10th in Hell's Kitchen, there is Bis.Co. Latte, Cafe Lali (for a great Spanish coffee), La Bergamote and Café Forant, to get you started. But, don't forget to check the playground at 10th and 47th. You might get lucky, especially if you look tired.

 Spring morning in Hell's Kitchen

April 2010

An Irish Brew

 

 Cup of the Day #7

Filigree Cup by Gwyneth Leech

White-out pen on green cardboard cup, 2009

My painting studio is on 39th Street, eight blocks down 9th Avenue from my apartment and a walk to work invariably full of incident. This morning, getting underway rather late, I am surprised by the volume of foot traffic until at Amy's Bread, the soda bread and paper shamrocks in the window plus the line out the door of people in green remind me that it is Saint Patrick's day.

I wait my turn in the amiable crush and order a scone and coffee to go. They serve excellent Illy espresso at Amy's and one of favorite breakfasts in Manhattan is to sit in here for a large bowl of Cafe au lait with french bread and butter, but I don't have time today. I get the Oran's decaf coffee on tap and am then am disappointed to find it extremely bitter when I taste it on my way down the street.

The Saint Patrick's Day Parade is already underway several blocks East and green-clad bar-flies are smoking their breakfasts outside the bars all the way down to 42nd Street. I dump my decaf in a trash can and go into Empire Tea and Coffee at 41st and 9th. This no-frills shop carries a great range of whole beans which the owner has roasted upstate. Their tea selection is also excellent - boxes at the front, loose leaf in glass jars at the back. And they sell a full menu of hot drinks to go, including outstanding espresso drinks at great prices.

I have been coming to Empire for years and always enjoy the personable baristas who seem to be drawn from a never-ending pool of aspiring jazz and pop musicians. The clientele includes artists, people heading to offices, construction workers from the burgeoning high rises in the neighborhood and postal employees from the depot on 42nd Street. There used to be a steady stream of musicians carrying instruments and headed for rehearsal studios on 41st, but that building was torn down to make way for a skyscraper a few years ago.

I order a Barry's Irish tea to mark the day. Barry's is Empire's house tea and it is a vigorous black brew which I drink strong with milk, no sugar. I like it almost as much as Brooke Bond's Scottish Blend. I lived in Scotland for 15 years and we swore by Scottish Blend, an unpretentious, full-bodied black tea sold in super markets at a modest price. When I moved to New York 10 years ago I persuaded Empire to order it for me and it is always stocked, and quite popular - despite the New York price tag.

By 4 PM I am heading back up 9th Avenue after a productive day painting. I didn't go to the parade. My ancestors are Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh in pretty equal parts so I choose not to celebrate any of the historically warring factions. The green revelers are more numerous now, and some are staggering. Here are some green wigs, there a green torso, lots of green trinkets. Outside Rudy's Bar and Grill at 44th Street I pause to admire the Swine on Nine. Today he is wearing a kilt!

 A reveler celebrating with the Swine on Nine

Saint Patrick's Day, NYC, 2010