aesthetics of joy

I posted Leah Rosenberg’s delightful work earlier this month, and couldn’t resist a follow-up post of this amazing rainbow cake she made for her show. The cake was 7′ feet long and made in 13 7″ sections, each with a different configuration of stripes. This really adds another joyful dimension — variation and surprise — as she writes:

So over time throughout the night, as it was cut & consumed (from both sides towards the center of the cake) the colors and stripe pattern of the slice of cake that you had would be different from the hours prior.

She must have been baking forever, but how beautiful! I also love how pure and serene the long white cake looks before it was cut. You’d never guess the riot of color that lay inside.

Check out more photos from the show here.

Spotted this on Oh Happy Day! I don’t drink soda but what a joyful idea for a party or event. And of course I’m a sucker for anything color-coded so this gave me a real thrill!

This looks like a delicious dessert for a spring day. Maybe something to eat when you’re wandering around Wuppertal…

And maybe if you were carrying…

On such a colorful day, you might run into someone like this:

And then if you got tired, you’d come home and take a seat:

My files are full of these joyful, colorful images that have caught my eye at one point or another. I save them up in folders with names like spirals and candy and things that look like ice cream. Then I forget what I put in them, and sometimes when I go in and open them up they are like little presents. This is the contents of my rainbows folder, now emptied out so I can start gathering anew!

Top to bottom: Rainbow jello, via DailyCandy; Holsteiner stairs in Wuppertal, by Horst Gläsker; Bolsaco by SuTurno; Photo by Paul Smith, posted on his (maddeningly non-permalinked) blog 13 August 09; Paper-wood stool by Drill Design.

ps: I love how Paul Smith describes his photo, above. He says, “this man is also a shop,” which is such a lovely window into his view of retailing. If you’ve ever walked through one of his whimsical, eclectic shops, you can immediately see the connection to this image, and the notion that selling is secondary to the pleasure of being among (and creating) arrangements of delightful things.

Oh, how I loved Gourmet. By far my favorite of the foodie mags, it’s always been a voice for the joy of food. Gourmet celebrated not just food’s flavor and aroma, but food as a visual art, food as a universal language, food as a carrier of cultural meaning and dialogue, food as biography of a food-lover’s life. It facilitated this passion for the short on time or skills to some degree, but never compromised the indulgent joy of a day arranged around cooking and eating by bludgeoning it with excessive pragmatism (ahem, Bon Appetit). I would have subscribed at three times the price to have kept it alive.

Aesthetics of joy are alive and well on this penultimate cover, so much so I’d already planned a post around it before this sad news arrived. Bright, vibrant color; the spherical apple; the shiny surface; the sticky sweetness you can practically taste just by looking at it — this is the joy of autumn made visible, and a clear illustration of what food culture is losing in Gourmet.

The NYT had a cute piece on bento boxes in this week’s Dining section. Kyaraben, the making of cute lunch boxes for children, rises to the level of art form in Japan. I found these on the Flickr photostream of a mom who makes these weekly for her kids. I think the hungry caterpillar one is irresistible, and the pandas had me at hello. A great example of aesthetics of joy applied to food. I’d be willing to bet that the food in those boxes tastes better than it would if it were just thrown in there too.

NYT: Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans