Welcome to the fourth instalment of a series of blog posts going more in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

Titles titles titles, maybe Fame & Fortune or Food is the final title for this piece and maybe not. Some titles come quickly and others take a while to feel settled. I’ve played with a number of titles for this piece but I don’t think this one is settled yet.

The economic pressure to get thin, and then to remain thin, is experienced at different intensity levels across society. There is an economic price in many occupations for not maintaining the current socially acceptable level of thinness. Thinner employees are often hired and promoted ahead of and valued higher than their heavier counterparts. This is supported in both research and anecdote. Having been larger and smaller, I have seen the difference in treatment from both sides in the workplace.

Where there is a competitive advantage in thinness, any one who feels the pressure of getting and keeping a regular pay check will also feel the pressure to present the image of the perfect (thin) employee. We then have two basic needs competing against each other, the need to eat and the need to be able to afford to eat. While size discrimination is prevalent across occupations it is most directly evident in the performing arts. To explore this conundrum created by diet culture I tapped the experience of Dawn van de Schoot whom I met through the Kitchen Feminism project. As an actress her experience was that, although she knew the harms of diet culture, everything just went so much more smoothly if she were thinner. Roles for thin actresses were/are more plentiful than for mid to large actresses.

In that context the pressure to ‘keep food on the table’ means that one feels one can never actually eat the food that one is now able to afford. To regularly eat to satiety, to enjoy the rewards of success, risks losing all that one has achieved, and all the rewards that are accorded to that achievement.

Further to that, I would like to add that not only do the performing arts disproportionately suffer from the toxic influence of diet culture, but by virtue of its role in creating the stories of our society, it also projects that influence outward across industries in which appearances and thinness should have little to no bearing on job performance:

Did I ever suffer or benefit from thin privilege or fat phobia in the workplace? Yes, both. However mainstream media entertainment leads us to be terrified of even the tiniest deviation from the thin ideal. The mythology says women (and increasingly men) risk loneliness and unemployment if I we get any bigger than a single digit dress size. Spouses will leave, no one will hire us and people in the streets will make fun of us. You know what? None of those things came true in my life despite having been anywhere from a size 6 to a size 22. But I can imagine that an actor or actress in Hollywood might not find work, that spouses also invested in image as status might leave, and random people on the internet might make fun of larger celebrities in what is effectively the street of our current online culture. In short, the dysfunctions of one particular section of society, by virtue of its role as the mirror of society, can magnify that dysfunction to all parts of society.

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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Welcome to the third instalment of a series of blog posts going in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The first is here. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

The banquet piece of party food in The Social Circuit was situated in the weight and cardio room at a local public fitness and aquatic centre in Calgary. However, The Social Circuit is not about the struggle to lose weight and get in shape. Although many who are attempting this will identify with the image, it is actually about that point when the weight loss has been achieved, the struggle is supposed to be over and congratulations are due. But happily ever after never quite seems to arrive.

The Social Circuit is also about the slow and unrecognized slide into eating disorders. Unrecognized in part because it seems logical and necessary behaviour at the time, if one wants to retain the reward of their efforts (a regular pant size, social approval, good health, eternal life…). However, these behaviours are so pervasive in western society that we don’t typically recognize them as disordered unless accompanied by a Body Mass Index in the underweight category. I deliberately ‘stopped’ losing weight when I got down to a ‘normal’ BMI, to avoid the dangers of becoming anorexic, or so I thought.

Some behavioural symptoms of anorexia include fear of gaining weight, skipping meals, not wanting to eat in public, a preoccupation with food, binge eating accompanied by bulimia (self induced vomiting, but also over-exercise and/or laxative abuse) and social withdrawal:

Going out to celebrate a birthday involves a host of dangers: turning down a slice of cake that I reallllly do want to eat, or conversely suffering the judgements about if I should be eating the cake (if anyone thinks I need to watch my weight, such is our culture), or being hungry but not having foods there on my safe list (orthorexia). Maybe I will not eat all day to save up calories for the event (skipping meals)? But then maybe the gathering will trigger a binge (as the body, which thinks it is starving, fights me for control). If there is alcohol consumed that can introduce a whole other level of issues around binging and bulimia. Outside that, the price of joining in the celebration could be hours of repetitive exercise (exercise bulimia) to burn off an afternoon’s indulgence.

The fear of social eating seems justified since the body’s response to the end of caloric restriction seems to be to hold on to as many added calories and as much water as it can. This can result in sudden and dramatic overnight weight gains that may have taken months to take off in the first place. Logically speaking, it’s unlikely there are enough calories in one indulgence to warrant the weight gain, given our understanding that 3700 calories = 1 pound (for reference, that indulgence would be like eating a dozen doughnuts at once, not something I’ve ever done). But logic can’t stand up to the scale, and off to the gym I go for atonement. About the time the last pound has come back off it is time for the next celebration.

Given that having friends and a family means an annual cycle of birthdays and other celebrations, there seem to be only two equally insane options, exit your health or exit your social circle. Of course, if we could separate the concept of health from diet culture, if we could recognize that the behaviours required to maintain a tight control of body weight are symptomatic of disordered eating, the right choice might be easier to make.

My point is not that I developed anorexia (although I recognize many of the physical, mental and emotional symptoms), but that many of us, myself included, may be much closer to developing anorexia than we should be comfortable with.

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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Welcome to the second instalment of a series of blog posts going more in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. You can read the first instalment here. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

On the other side of Reader Rock Gardens, separated by an iron fence on the peak of the hillside is Union Cemetery, founded in 1890 looking north and west across the bustling centre of Calgary. A Story As Old As Time pictures the fence that divides the gardens from the cemetery, and you can see gravestones in the tree window to the right of the cupcake. As you can guess this makes The Party Ended Too Early the next mise en scène in this series. (Side note, the paintings are not necessarily conceived of as being in a definite order, however these two definitely begin the series.)

There are many entry points for the individual into diet culture. It could be argued that evading the pressure to participate in diet culture would actually be an exceptional circumstance for most in western culture, tied as the image of the thin body is to conceptions of morality, meritocracy, productivity, beauty, desirability, good health, self control and personal responsibility.

This painting is complicated for me, so forgive me if words don’t do it justice (probably why I’m a painter, not a writer). It marks the transition of my own participation in diet culture from the recreational dabbling of my adolescent preoccupation with appearances and an emulation of the postures of adulthood, into an awareness of mortality, grief, loss and fear of discrimination that pushes one into a serious commitment.

The numbers on the grave stones are not dates but the ages of those beloved people lost too soon to morbid obesity. Obesity was not the cause of death, but rather was the visible sign of their health complications. The pain of losing them is mixed together with the pain of witnessing: the extremes they went to in conforming to societies expectations, the frustration of their aspirations to triumph over their biology, and the suspicion that had they been able to visibly conform to societies perception of ‘taking care of their health’ when seeking medical care, they may have still been with us today.

Did their struggles against underlying health conditions and natural body shapes help or hinder their health in the long run? I know now that the vast majority of diets end up in weight gains as opposed to losses. Chronic high levels of stress hormones in the system contribute to insulin resistance, high cholesterol and blood pressure as well as weight gain; caloric restriction is one of the conditions which triggers the release of stress hormones. In short, did encouragement to participate in diet culture contribute to their early demise?

But that is late knowledge, and as painful as that is in itself, thinking that knowing more then could have kept them with us, it is past time now. The easy answer, the dominant socially acceptable one, was diet to reduce body size, the visible sign, of ill health. It offered promising protection against the the biases of society and ultimately against the uncertainty of life and death.

Work In Progress Slideshow:

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Welcome to the first instalment of a series of blog posts going into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

I began this series thinking about the link between love and hunger, two of our primal drives. I was still thinking about gardens as a pseudo natural space after having painted a small homage to Bosch in Tempting Fruit (2022), and I thought what more romantic garden image than Fragonard’s The Swing (1767)? The woman in that painting, the garden interloper’s object of desire, decked out in pink and lace and frills, reminded me of an extravagant cupcake, designed to evoke that ancient desire to consume – ate ;-).

My garden was based on Reader Rock Gardens Historic Park in the City of Calgary. It was an internationally renowned garden established by William Roland Reader, the Superintendent for Calgary Parks (1913 – 1942). During Reader’s life the garden had and trialed 3000 – 4000 plant species from around the world as well as Canada. Although declared a city park after his death, the garden languished for decades until an initiative in the mid 2000’s had it restored and reopened. Incredibly some of those early plants have survived and can still be seen in the park today.

It seems our drive to survive can carry us beyond all expectation. Our lives frequently follow the age old story of love, mating, procreating, protecting, providing and nurturing. In all of those stages we have evolved to guarantee the safety of our species, our mates and progeny, by putting up extra stores of energy to survive those times when we are neglected by the world and resources are slim.

When foods are engineered to be as appealing as possible, while every instinct we have encourages us to ‘put by’ a little extra, is it any wonder the dress maker’s tape has to go round further and further?

And so begins my journey through health and diet culture for the purposes of this series.

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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I’m writing this at about the halfway point of the project as funded by Calgary Arts Development’s individual artist project grant program. Earthly Delights – 10 Paintings of Food in Places, has close to half of the paintings nearing completion now, and I have begun assembling the reference material for the next three paintings in the project. By the time you read this blog post I anticipate the first four paintings will be complete, the next three will be well into development and I will be assembling reference material for the final 3 paintings in the project.

So by way of a progress report I will share process images of the first four paintings along with a few production notes on each of them. In later individual posts I will share my thought process behind each of these paintings along with the finished images. Until then, enjoy!

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The setting for Stories as Old as Time is a collage of various spots I photographed at Reader Rock Gardens in Calgary this summer. If you haven’t been, it is a real treat, a very special garden space in a city more familiar for its prairie grasslands and naturalized green spaces. As this painting references Fragonard’s french rococo painting, The Swing, it has been quite a challenge to interpret this contemporary Calgary garden space through that lens, but thrilling to see the painting come together.

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Leaving the Party Too Early is set in Union Cemetery, which is on the other side of the fence from Reader Rock Gardens. Fun fact, there is a reference to that in the background of Stories as Old as Time (top). I think you can tell that I am debating how I am going to incorporate a few elements in the painting around the central tombstone and between the grave plot wall and table on the right side of the painting. However I do have a plan for that and hope it goes well in the completion of the painting. I photographed the setting in the summer, however for the finished painting I want a more autumnal feeling, so I have been shifting the colours from the reference photos, taken on a clear summer day, to a moodier green/orange/purple scheme.

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The Social Circuit was photographed at the Canyon Meadows Aquatic and Fitness Centre after hours. The lighting was quite challenging, being a combination of flat overhead and front facing flash. Plus I was taking the picture from between the arms of neighbouring fitness equipment. They cast some pretty odd shadows that are none the less an interesting compositional element I may choose to work with. Inspiration comes from all sorts of unlikely places. For this painting I had to manufacture a semblance of a fancy celebration cake and a wedding cake. This required a lot of Youtube tutorials for cake stacking and cake icing and piping techniques, and a few days of preparing the props before they could be photographed. So I have a new skill set now (I’m probably setting a high expectation for the next birthday cake I bake). Originally I intended this painting should have a very warm beige for the gym space, however the window areas, which I wanted to be a more spacious feeling blue-green, were so eye-catching on the left side of the painting I decided I had to shift the beige of the fitness room more to the green side. This choice basically meant a marathon 12 hour painting session that day. More colour adjustments from my initial design will be necessary as I paint the still life portion of the image. But that’s what keeps painting interesting isn’t it? It rarely goes exactly to plan.

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This setting for Every New Salvation was photographed at a walk-in and family practice medical centre in my local area. As you can imagine photographing in these spaces, which are currently being used, requires a quickness, flexibility and sensitivity to maintaining privacy of the users and not getting in the way of the staff. So there is a lot of knowing what elements I need to photograph and understanding that I will need to collage together different elements to fulfill my vision for the painting. Then back at the studio I find an area that has a similar lighting profile to the primary setting to stage the still life portion of the composition. For the still life I checked out 40+ health and diet books from the library to use as props. I imagine the poor librarians, should they stop to wonder why I am checking out so many different kinds of diet books, wondering how conflicted I must be to be trying so many different diets on at once. I certainly got some weight training lugging them all to the studio and back.

So Enchantment came about after I painted Tempting Fruit earlier this year. I loved the way that the chocolate cupcake in that painting just seemed like an over the top amalgam of all the wiley ways it could look like a tempting treat.

That painting made me think of other romantic gardens. So of course it was a short step from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights to Fragonard’s french rococo garden in The Swing. Prior to painting Enchantment I baked and frosted several cupcakes, really going for an over the top frothy look for the cupcake like the heroine in Fragonard’s The Swing. From there I painted Cupcake Digest, to study the cupcake in isolation prior to placing it in a larger environment.

I had two ways to go with my inspiration to create a Fragonard inspired banquet piece in my food series with the little pink pear. I could either couch my food actors in a landscape or I could create an entirely domestic/still life version of The Swing.

So I decided to do both:

Watch my blog to see the landscape version in my Earthly Delights project, It’s currently on the easel and should be finished soon.

For Enchantment I decided to explore that domestic setting because I really loved the potential for changing the perspective in the typical still life setting from something observed at a safe distance, and from slightly above, to one closer to the viewpoint of one of the still life objects, or of a bugs eye view. What was contained in the picture plane now contains the picture plane. It’s not a separate world, it is the world.