The Cuisine Cards

by Laurie Goodhart

$100.00

200 in stock

Category: Item sold: 0

Description

Set of four offset lithographic prints, signed and numbered by the artist. Each measures 18 x 14″

The Cuisine Cards celebrate our universal joy in food: providing, preparing, offering, and eating it. They’re designed in the rustic style of early Renaissance printed playing cards but there is an intentional lack of power hierarchy in the face cards.  The order of the Shaper, Mover, and Taster simply echo the natural progression of food from raw to our mouth. 

I’ve always had a fondness for the visual aspect of playing cards, and collect books on them. One image of an uncut sheet of cards printed in 1585 in Frankfurt, where the black and white cards were jammed in every which way on a large sheet of paper, inspired the look of these four prints, The Cuisine Cards.

Four food types were chosen and then situated geographically, with some arbitrary zeroing in on their specific associations.
Tomatoes here are set in the ancient Mediterranean, even though they are native to the Americas, and apparently didn’t make it to Europe until the mid 1500s.
Instead, the suit of Spices is situated in the tropical region of the Americas, because, well, I love cacao (the 3 of Spices), and because after 15 years of delivering our farm’s cheeses to scores of kitchens and farm stores around the Hudson Valley, I especially wanted to honor the huge gift northern latitude people are always receiving from the people who come up here from way south to do much of the hard work in our food supply chain.
Onions were placed in North Africa because ancient Egyptians ate a lot of them and also included them in their embalming techniques.
Herbs, not Spices, were placed in India because of a magical month I once spent there, and the herb we call here, Curry Plant (7 of Herbs), that I associate with the trip.

Almost all the writing on each of the prints says the pertinent titling word in various scripts of the particular region, from some of its different periods and cultures.

When I look at all the cards complete and together, I see a larger vision that formed itself — of our human “world” as it is, and could more fully be as we continue to free ourselves from obsessions with power and greed. A world of beauty, delight in simplicity, creativity within the humble and the constantly renewable. A bottomless magical treasure chest of jewel-like people and their offerings.

A very limited number of each of the original hand printed, hand painted prints are available also. Email me for more info and I can post them here if you wish to purchase.

Laurie Goodhart

As an artist immersed in the mythic, the mystic, and the cycles of Nature, I offer deeply rooted totemic imagery for this liminal time, all of it conceived as part of a lost sanctuary.

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