Announcing the February release of the 2010 edition of Mosaic Art Now

Mosaic Art Now is an arts annual devoted to the promotion of fine art mosaics. It's also a project very near and dear to my heart. The editors of Mosaic Art Now; Bill Buckingham, Nancie Mills-Pipgras and Michael Welch, recently announced the 15 February shipping date of the much-anticipated 2010 edition of the publication.

The 2010 edition is twice as large as last year's, a feat all but unheard of in the world of print publications. The strength of this year's edition is a testament to both the commitment of MAN's editors, and the depth of worldwide participation and interest in fine art mosaics.

The new issue is filled with feature stories by such luminaries as JoAnn Locktov, Sonia King, Laurel True, Jennifer Blakebrough-Raeburn and some guy named Paul Anater. There's an artists' marketplace, guest commentaries, new discoveries and the truly exceptional Exhibition in Print. The cover art this year is Morning by Ann Gardner and photographed by Lisa Jacoby.

To whet your appetite; Nancie, Bill and Michael have made available Jennifer Blakebrough-Raeburn's Five Sisters: Vitae Summa Brevis as a .pdf for preview. In her article, Jennifer tells the story of Emma Biggs and Michael Collings' installation in York St. Mary's, a deconsecrated medieval church in northern England. Emma Biggs used 13th and 14th century pot shards to create her site-specific mosaics and the effect is as ephemeral as it is inescapably human. Give it a read and know that Jennifer's article is but a taste of wonders that await in 2010's Mosaic Art Now.

You can order a copy of the new publication now and it will ship on the 15th. Shipping is the same for multiple copies, so gang your orders. Last year's issue sits proudly on the end of my coffee table and I'm looking forward to having 2010's issue to sit next to it.

And yes, you read that right a couple paragraphs back. "Some guy named Paul Anater" wrote a feature story for the new issue. It was my great pleasure to meet with and interview Yakov and Yulia Hanansen, two amazing mosaicists who happen to be father and daughter. On a dreary Manhattan Saturday morning, I sat in Yakov Hanansen's studio and we talked for hours about art and life. I ended up learning how to make my own tesserae that day. Yakov sat me at his hardie (a stump with a special chisel fitted into it), handed me a martellina (that's a hammer shaped to make tesserae specifically) and I was on my way.

Talk about a hands-on education. If you've read this blog before, then you know that I am an enthusiastic supporter of fine art mosaics. My involvement with Mosaic Art Now is dream come true in many ways and I am as grateful as I am humbled to be counted as a contributor to this fine publication. Now go buy an issue. Here's the link.

Winter turns to summer with the Smitten Kitchen

Ahhhh, January. In my part of the world, January means warm, sunny afternoons and cool nights. Winter for us is what spring is for people in cooler climates and it's also when citrus fruits come into season. By now, Florida grapefruit and oranges ought to be trickling into grocery stores all over the place and we're up to our elbows in them. I'm not complaining. We get the pick of the litter and most of the specialty citurs fruits that grow here never make it out of Florida. Minneolas, honeybelle tangerines, kumquats, key limes, meyer lemons, bitter oranges, blood oranges, clementines, mandarins, and the list goes on. I could live on local citrus fruit and die a happy man.

A cooking blog I like to read is Smitten Kitchen, written by Deb and Alex Perelman. Deb's a chef's chef and she prepares her delicacies in a 46 square foot kitchen on New York's Upper West Side. I love her take on food. She doesn't believe in fuss or unnecessary complication, she's about flavor and hospitality instead. Her recipes prove beyond a doubt that great food isn't dependent on fancy equipment or posh ingredients. Great food is an attitude as much as anything.

Anyhow, Deb and Alex featured a recipe that I'll be having for lunch today. I'll let you know how it goes. Here's the recipe.

Mixed Citrus Salad with Feta, Onion and Mint

3 to 4 tablespoons red onion, cut into tiny bits
4 pieces of citrus, preferably a mix of grapefruits and oranges but use what you can get, and what you like to eat (spoiled by the spread at the store, I used 1 pink grapefruit, 1 cara cara and 1 blood orange, and 1 mineola)
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar or lemon juice
1 teaspoon smooth Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
3 to 4 tablespoons (1.5 ounces) feta cheese, chopped or crumbled
1 tablespoon fresh mint, chopped or cut into tiny slivers

Place your red onion in the bottom of a medium bowl. Nest a strainer over the bowl.

Prepare your citrus fruits by beveling the stem end of one, cutting enough off that you reveal the pith-free flesh of the fruit. Repeat on the other end. Rest your fruit on one of its now-flat surface and begin cutting the peel and pith off in large, vertical pieces. You want the fruit’s exterior to be “white”-free.

Turn the fruit back on its side and cut it into 1/4-inch thick wheels, removing any seeds and thick white stem as you do. Place the wheels and any collected juices from the cutting board in the strainer over the bowl with onion. Repeat with remaining citrus fruits. (As the extra juices drip over the bowl, it will soften the raw onion bite.)

Spread the fruit slices out on a platter. Scoop out the onion bits (a slotted spoon or fork does the trick) and sprinkle them over, leaving the juice in the bowl. Whisk one tablespoon of juice (this is all I had accumulated) with red wine vinegar or lemon juice, Dijon and olive oil. Season with salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Drizzle the dressing over the citrus, sprinkle with feta and mint, adjust salt and pepper to taste, serve immediately and daydream of warmer places.

Recipe and photos from Smitten Kitchen

It's a light! It's a speaker! It's both?

Check it out. These rooms have speakers in the ceiling and they're fully visible in these photos.

That living room and that kitchen have Klipsch's new LightSpeaker System installed.

The LightSpeaker System is a wireless speaker and a LED can light in one. That's a pot light for my Canadian readers. Most interestingly, they work as a retrofit. There's no wiring involved.

I'd be curious to see what the temperature of the light produced is. It's a great idea frankly, and I'd love to hear from anybody who has these fixtures installed. They are available directly from Kipsch's website. Kudos to Klipsch!

I still love New York

My Chrysler Building

I love Manhattan with a passion that straddles the zone somewhere between infatuation and lust. It's alternatively enraging and ecstasy-inducing. It's a feast of the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, the beautiful and the ugly. There's no where else on earth like it. New York summons the best from me, as strange as that sounds. When I'm running through those streets I feel compelled to think smarter, to work harder, to be more.

The Lexington Avenue entrance to the Chrysler Building

Well in two weeks I'll be in the throes of thinking smarter, working harder and being more. My great pals at Brizo have invited me back for another Fashion Week event. In precisely two weeks I'll be second guessing what I'm wearing to a top tier runway show. For the second time in six months I might add.

An elevator in the lobby of the Chrysler Building

Team Brizo has invited me and a whole host of my bloggery compatriots to attend a seminar, a similar seminar to the one I attended last fall. What's going to be really interesting about this one is that all of the attendees are designers with internet followings. Now I "know" but have never met most of the people who will be in New York for this Brizo happening. I cannot wait to get back to New York, that's for sure. But when you throw in the fact that I'm going to be able to hang out with most of my blogging and Twittering cohorts, it's almost too much to think about. I hope team Brizo's prepared to entertain one dynamic group of people. The energy! The synergy! The industry gossip! I cannot wait and I can't find words to describe how it feels to be part of such an august assembly. I look over the attendee list and I see the names of just about everybody whose work and whose words I respect and admire.

The lobby desk of the Chrysler Building

It's not unusual for a manufacturer to host a group of specifiers for a product education seminar. I have been to more than my share of them. For the most part, they're pretty sedate affairs. We get the chance to kick the tires of products we can't always see in person and the manufacturers get to interact with and get feedback from the people who specify their products. So far as I know though, no company has ever assembled a group of specifiers who are also social media influencers. More, Brizo picked all of us specifically because we're social media influencers. Clearly, this is a company that values transparency and wants to engage its customers directly. This is big. I like Brizo's products and I liked them even before any of this New York stuff started. But their embrace of new and social media makes me respect them as an organization. Thanks Brizo!

A stairwell in the Chrysler Building

Photography from New York Daily Photo by Brian Dubé

Ikea: WHY wait? Or, I get served a helping of crow

This is me in an Ikea kitchen in Italy. Disclosure time: this is my only first-hand experience with Ikea cabinetry. I reported in August '08 that the kitchen in the photograph had one redeeming quality, it's location overlooking the Bay of Naples.

A couple of nights ago, I posted an old post up on Twitter. I do that from time to time. It's a way to get some exposure for posts buried deep in my archives that I think warrant some more attention. Considering that no one read my blog back then, I want them to get some attention for the first time. Anyhow, the other night I posted a little gem from August of '08, IKEA can wait. It was a typically ham-fisted and inflammatory slam on all things Ikea, but Ikea kitchens particularly.

Well in the year-and-a-half since that post ran originally, a lot has changed. I know a lot more people from all sides of the kitchen and bath industry and a really cool person I've come to know int he last couple of months (through Twitter of course) is Becky Shankle. Becky is a designer from Raleigh, NC. She's also a blogger, a dedicated businesswoman and she knows how to use Twitter. Becky's business is designing kitchens using cabinetry from Ikea and her work's fantastic.

Needless to say, my ham-fisted rantings about Ikea cabinetry stepped on her toes. She wrote the following on her blog, Eco Modernism, yesterday. I'm reprinting it here with her blessing. So here's Becky:

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Ikea: WHY wait?
January 27th, 2010

Just the facts, ma'am.
Paul Anater's got a post about custom vs. Ikea cabinets over on his blog today. I have to admit that when I first started designing kitchens with Ikea components, I was highly skeptical. I did my own research on it, queried Ikea cabinet owning & using people, talking to the people at the store, checking it out myself.

Of the people who owned & used daily Ikea kitchen cabinets, they overwhelmingly said they would purchase them again, they have had them in place & in use with no breakdowns or visible wear & tear for as long as 22 years. The only negative report I got from the same group was that the countertops faded & scratched unevenly.

Here's some points to compare when shopping around for cabinets:

• Hardware: Ikea uses high quality Blum hardware on all kitchen components. Full extension drawer slides & soft closure mechanisms are *standard* on all doors & drawers. (Are you being upcharged on those custom boxes for such bells and whistles?)
• Warranty: Ikea warrants all cabinetry for 25 years.
• Strength: Every Ikea base cabinet is rated to hold 1,100 pounds.
• Organization: matching drawer dividers & other inserts made for their drawer system make small kitchens run as smoothly as bigger ones.
• Price: The cabinets for an average sized kitchen from Ikea (about 14 boxes - walls and bases) runs about $5,000.

The old standby
As for the argument about particle board, which Ikea uses in all its cabinets, I did some research on that, too. See my post here.

Don't take my word for it.
Ikea is not for everyone. And not all things that come from Ikea are fantastic & high quality (some of their furniture comes to mind). They have, however, engineered their cabinet products very well, & stand behind them with a warranty.

If you have the money & want to spend it on extremely high end cabinets (whatever "high end" actually means), go for it. But don't knock Ikea if you haven't honestly looked at it. That extra $45k could come in handy as a downpayment for a nice cottage in Naples.

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Point made, steaming plate of crow served. Check out Becky's blog, Becky's admirable business model and follow her on Twitter.