Critics of art and philosophers of science and have long wrestled with the question of what elevates a piece of art or a set of experiments to masterpiece status. The general consensus is that great art and great science share three characteristics. The first is that the work is so original that it overwhelms us by its power. The second is that it stands the test of time. And the third is that is changes the way generations of artists or scientists think about their field. Masterpieces of art and science are like hooks that capture our imagination.
Culinary Canvas: Masterpieces Celebrating Nature’s Palette
Food is not merely sustenance; it’s a sensory experience that engages our taste buds, sight, smell, and even our emotions. Culinary artists around the world have taken this notion to heart, creating dishes that not only tantalize our palates but also celebrate the vibrant spectrum of colors found in nature.
In this article, we will embark on a journey through the world of culinary masterpieces that go beyond taste, placing a spotlight on dishes that celebrate colors, turning dining into an art form.
Sushi: A Palette of Flavors and Hues
Sushi, originating from Japan, is a prime example of a culinary masterpiece that celebrates colors. Traditional sushi showcases a rainbow of ingredients, from the deep green of avocado to the bright orange of salmon and the translucent white of rice.
These colors aren’t just visually appealing but also represent the freshness and quality of the ingredients used.
Indian Cuisine: A Symphony of Spices and Pigments
Indian cuisine is renowned for its rich and diverse use of spices, which not only infuse dishes with flavor but also create a mesmerizing spectrum of colors.
A classic example is the vibrant yellow of turmeric in curry dishes, the deep red of paprika in tandoori preparations, and the lush green of coriander in chutneys.
These colors tell a story of India’s cultural diversity and the range of ingredients found across its vast landscape.
Mexican Cuisine: The Fiesta of Tastes and Colors
Mexican cuisine is a fiesta of flavors and colors. The combination of ingredients like tomatoes, avocados, cilantro, and peppers creates a visually stunning array of dishes.
Think of the lively red, green, and white of a classic Mexican salsa or the dazzling multicolored layers of a well-crafted taco. Mexican cuisine doesn’t just appeal to the taste buds; it’s a feast for the eyes.
Mediterranean Delights: A Sea of Blues and Earthy Tones
Mediterranean cuisine draws inspiration from the sea and the earth. The azure blues of the Mediterranean Sea are echoed in dishes like Greek Tzatziki, while the warm earthy tones of olive oil, hummus, and falafel pay homage to the region’s landscapes.
These colors convey the simplicity and wholesomeness of Mediterranean ingredients.
French Patisserie: Artistry on a Plate
French patisserie is known for its exquisite presentation, where every dessert is a miniature work of art. Macarons come in a rainbow of colors and flavors, from pistachio green to raspberry pink.
Pastel-colored éclairs, adorned with edible flowers, are a testament to the French passion for aesthetics. Each dessert tells a story through its colors, inviting diners to savor both taste and beauty.
Fruits and Vegetables: Nature’s Color Palette
Nature itself provides a stunning array of colorful ingredients. From the deep purples of eggplants to the radiant oranges of citrus fruits, nature’s bounty inspires chefs to create visually striking dishes.
The use of edible flowers, microgreens, and heirloom tomatoes in contemporary cuisine elevates the dining experience to an art form, where each plate resembles a miniature garden.
Conclusion
Culinary masterpieces that celebrate colors offer more than just a delightful meal; they provide a multisensory experience that engages our senses and emotions.
These dishes not only showcase the creativity and artistry of chefs but also pay tribute to the rich amalgamation of cultures and ingredients around the world.
So, the next time you sit down to enjoy a colorful dish, take a moment to savor not just the taste but the visual feast that’s set before you. After all, culinary art is about celebrating the full spectrum of life’s flavors and colors.
Thank you for taking time to read this article. Have a great time enjoying the food around you.
Your life is your canvas, and you are the masterpiece
Starting a business can be very difficult, but to help and support our fellow entrepreneurs, we will be producing a set of guides for business owners over the next couple of months.
To start, we thought we look at the planning process. Ever have a mental block in business? The equivalent to a writers block, but the entrepreneurial version. Basically stuck on where to start or what to progress.
According to goinswriter.com “It is a creative person’s preemptive defence against judgement”.
Basically are minds are stuck on what others will think or perceive. So much so, that we literally freeze on starting any creativity.
Or another cause of procrastination, is being overwhelmed with too much choice. Mentally getting stuck thinking what to action next, without ever actioning something specific or doing too much, you end up doing too little of each.
In our judgement and experience, writing a plan goes some way in solving these fallacies.
Writing a business plan, is not like writing a book. The business plan is mainly for you. No one initially should read your draft. It is a short-hand, long-hand, scribble and notes. A collection of your ideas and how you will research, tackle or implement them.
Remove the idea of what others will think, and focus on what you think really matters. A good quote that sums this up from the musician Kerli:
“Your life is your canvas, and you are the masterpiece. There are a million ways to be kind, amazing, fabulous, creative, bold, and interesting”
The best way to start a plan, is to start with questions. They can be ones that you consider important, but there is also no point re-inventing the wheel – some good ones we used that can help get you going:
- What is your product or service?
- Who are your clients?
- How does your offer compare with the competition?
- And how you will reach the potential audience?
But we also suggest not too many questions. You don’t want the idea or planning process becoming overwhelming. You want to enjoy the process of getting better insights to your business.
The document should be your personal guide on how to approach your enterprise. It should be brief enough to get you going. But also just enough for you to expand on in the future. Also involve your existing clients, pick their brains and write their feedback down.
For example, our business plan at the start of the business was to offer tech solutions to small to medium businesses. It initially focused on just delivering websites with advanced capabilities, but after a year of running our business, due to our client demand, we ended up pivoting just to web based software and mobile applications.
We thought through the process of the change and by documenting it, our team was able to adapt quickly.
We edit our business plan on a monthly basis, adjusting our guide and our targets accordingly. The plan is ever evolving. It should be the base thoughts of your business, your goals, ideas, and even a record of your accomplishments.
Planning should not take hours upon hours, but it should be part of your entrepreneurial discipline. Having a day month to review and adjust, should hopefully keep you focused.
As the saying goes,
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
Raft’s Influence on Prominent 20th Century Artists
In 1824, Raft was purchased by The Louvre, where it has been viewed by hundreds of millions of people over the last two centuries. It is arguably the most arresting painting in The Louvre and has stimulated many artists to produce their own variations of the painting. One such example is a work by the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman. Newman is known for his “zip” pictures in which fields of colors are painted on a large rectangular canvas and then separated by thin vertical strips of contrasting color that extended from the bottom of the canvas to the top (Temkin, 2002). The vertical strips − the “zips” − grab our attention and help define the spatial structure of his rectangular-shaped canvases (Figure 4, left).
In 1968, Newman visited The Louvre for the first time. Raft was the picture that fascinated him the most. “It’s fantastic! ….. You can feel the surge of the water, the figures tumbling out toward us” (Schneider, 2002). Newman was also especially impressed with the triangular composition of Géricault’s painting. On his return to New York, Newman painted a “zip” picture in the shape of a triangle (Figure 4, right). This was a radical departure from all of his previous rectangular-shaped paintings. Since his triangular canvas had no rectangular walls, Newman entitled the painting Jericho in reference to the Old Testament city whose walls came tumbling down. The title is also a pun on Géricault’s name. Although Jericho and Géricault are not spelled the same way, they are phonetically identical (Schneider, 2002).
Figure 4. Two Artworks by Barnett Newman
(Right) Adam. 1951/1952. Oil on canvas. 7.9 x 6.7 ft. Tate, London. (Left) Jericho. Oil on canvas. 1968/1969. 9.4 x 8.8 ft. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Another prominent artist inspired by Géricault’s Raft is Frank Stella, known for his geometric paintings and abstract sculptures (Auping, et al., 2015). In 1990, Stella began experimenting with steel and other metals, and one of his first sculpted works was inspired by Géricault’s painting. Stella’s Raft of the Medusa is an enormous twisting grey mass of aluminum − 13 feet high, wide, and deep − that evokes the cacophony of suffering bodies clinging to a dilapidated raft constructed out of chicken wire and steel beams (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Raft of Medusa, Part I
Frank Stella. 1990. Aluminum with steel pipes, other metals, and chicken wire. 14 x 13.5 x 13.3 ft. (Left) Front side of sculpture evoking cacophony of suffering bodies clinging to dilapidated raft. (Right) Back side of sculpture showing raft constructed out of chicken wire and steel beams. The Glass House Collection, New Canaan, CT. © 2018 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Stella’s immense sculpture and Newman’s triangular painting are themselves great works of art that pay homage to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa − a painting that overwhelms us by its originality and power and one that has stood the test of time − the two cardinal characteristics that define a work of art as a masterpiece.
2018 Lasker Awards
Like Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, the original research of this year’s Lasker Awardees has changed the way scientists and physicians think about their particular fields.
The Lasker Basic Research Award honors Michael Grunstein (University of California, Los Angeles) and David Allis (Rockefeller University) for discoveries elucidating how gene expression is influenced by posttranslational covalent modifications of histones − the proteins that package DNA within chromosomes. For many years, scientists did not appreciate the importance of histones in gene expression. Histones were largely believed to be simply the glue that held DNA together in chromosomes. This view began to change in the early 1990’s when Grunstein initiated genetic experiments in yeast cells that demonstrated a requirement for the N-terminal tails of histones in activating and silencing genes. He then went on to identify specific lysine residues in the histone tails that turned out to be targets of post-translational acetylation. This ground-breaking work set the stage for Allis’ classic biochemical experiments in 1996 showing that a histone acetyltransferase from Tetrahymena was the homologue of GCN5, a genetically defined translational coactivator in yeast. Allis went on to show that purified GCN5 possessed intrinsic histone acetyltransferase activity that directly acetylated specific lysines in the histone tails. These biochemical findings, when considered together with the genetic studies of Grunstein, provided solid evidence for the role of histone acetylation in gene expression.
A flood of research rapidly ensued. Hundreds of scientists began working in this new field. Other histone modifications (including methylation, phosphorylation, and ubiquitination) and the enzymes that add and remove these residues were identified and characterized. The implications for biomedical science are profound: 1) histone modifications influence the activation or silencing of virtually every eukaryotic transcriptional network studied to date; 2) mutations disrupting the histone machinery underline several Mendelian disorders of development (e.g., Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome and Kabuki syndrome); and 3) histone-modifying enzymes, such as those that remove methyl and acetyl groups, are being actively pursued as therapeutic targets for a variety of malignant diseases, including solid tumors (especially pediatric gliomas), lymphomas, and leukemias. To date, only a few such inhibitors of histone deacetylates and demethylases have been approved for human use. But hundreds of clinical trials are currently in the works
The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Research Award honors John Baird Glen (AstraZeneca, retired) for the discovery and development of propofol, the most widely used agent for induction of anesthesia in patients throughout the world. In 1972, Glen joined Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in London (through mergers, ICI subsequently became AstraZeneca). At ICI, he carried out a chemical screen searching for anesthetic agents that possessed three desirable properties: fast onset, short recovery time, and absence of the “hang-over” effects observed in mice administered other anesthetics. Of the thousands of agents tested, Glen selected propofol (2,6-diisopropylphenol) as a promising hypnotic.
Propofol is an oil at room temperature, which created a formidable formulation challenge that took Glen and his colleagues 10 years to solve. Success was ultimately achieved with a soybean-egg lecithin emulsion that rendered propofol in a soluble form that could be used intravenously in patients and animals. The size range of the emulsified propofol droplets (marketed as Driprivan®) refracts light, creating a milky color that led anesthesiologists to refer to it as “milk of amnesia”. Propofol was approved in 1986 in the UK, in 1989 in the US, and subsequently in 90 other countries.
In 2013 when the World Heart Organization (WHO) added propofol to the list of essential medicines, more than 190 million people worldwide had received the anesthetic. In the US in 2014, 10 million inpatient surgical operations and 17 million outpatient surgeries were performed, virtually all of which were initiated with propofol. The favorable properties of propofol – its rapid onset of action, quick metabolism by the liver, and freedom from residual effects such as nausea, vomiting, and grogginess – are largely responsible for the recent widespread increase in ambulatory surgery and outpatient diagnostic procedures, such as colonoscopy and bronchoscopy.
John Baird Glen discovered the anesthetic properties of propofol, and for more than 20 years he guided its transformation from an insoluble chemical compound to arguably the most important anesthetic since the introduction of ether in 1846. His persistent pursuit of the ideal anesthetic has improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.
The Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award is given to a scientist whose lifetime contribution to biomedical science is universally admired for its creativity, importance and impact, and whose professional statesmanship has engendered among her colleagues the deepest feelings of awe and respect. This year’s award honors Joan Argetsinger Steitz (Yale University) for four decades of leadership in biomedical science − exemplified by her pioneering discoveries in nuclear RNA, her generous mentorship of hundreds of budding scientists, and her vigorous and passionate support of women in science.
Joan Steitz has been a towering figure in the field of RNA biology for 45 years, beginning with her graduate work on the structure and function of RNA in RNA-containing bacteriophages. Her most notable scientific achievement came in 1979 and the early 1980’s when she discovered that antisera against nuclear antigens from patients with lupus and other autoimmune diseases targeted distinct entities, each of which contained a specific small nuclear RNA and a common set of proteins, which she and her student Michael Lerner named snRNPs (small nuclear ribonuclearproteins). These antibodies proved to be key reagents that revealed the earliest biochemical studies on the spliceosome, the particles that are sites of processing of pre-messenger RNA into the final mRNA. Steitz also discovered that introns, which were thought to be inert, code for snoRNAs (small nucleolar RNAs) that function in the processing of ribosomal RNA. Steitz’s most recent RNA venture has led her into the world of small noncoding viral RNAs that perturb cellular homeostasis.
Throughout her academic career, Steitz has served on multiple review panels and advisory committees for universities, research institutes, and funding agencies. She is asked to serve on these committees not because she is a woman scientist, but because of her wise counsel and broad expertise in academic and scientific matters. For 12 years, she served as scientific director of the Jane Coffin Childs Fund, which grants postdoctoral fellowships to outstanding young biomedical scientists.
Over the last 40 years, Steitz has mentored more than 200 students (undergraduate, graduate, and M.D.-Ph.D.) and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have gone on to establish their own research careers in laboratories in the U.S. and other countries. One unique aspect of Steitz’s mentoring style is her belief that students and postdoctoral fellows who work completely independently should be allowed to publish on their own. Of the 360 publications that have originated from her laboratory, 60 of them do not include her name in the list of authors. Such generosity of this scale is indeed rare.
A discussion of Steitz’s statesmanship would not be complete without mentioning the fact that she is a role model for young women scientists. This is a responsibility that she has taken seriously throughout her career. When Steitz herself started her graduate career at the Biological Laboratories at Harvard University in 1963 and her postdoctoral fellowship at the MRC in Cambridge in 1967, there were essentially no women as role models and few if any women scientists in the laboratories where she trained. To have accomplished so much at the time she began in science certainly engenders “the deepest feeling of awe and respect.”
REFERENCES
Miles, J. (2007). The Wreck of the Medusa. (New York: Grove Press).
Eitner, L.E.A. (1973). Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa”. (London, UK: Phaidon Press Ltd.)
Schneider, P. (2002). Flat forms, deep thoughts: Newman on Géricault. In Reconsidering Barnett Newman, M. Ho, ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art), pp. 132-147.
Alhadeff, A. (2002). The Raft of the Medusa: Géricault, Art, and Race. (New York: Prestel Publishing).
Temkin, A. (2002). Barnett Newman on exhibition. In Barnett Newman, A. Temkin, ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art), pp. 18-75.
Auping, M. Weinberg, A.D., Kantor, J., and Owens, L. (2015) Frank Stella: A Retrospective. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
