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Sayre-Inspired Chefs Create Fine Cuisine to Support Kids

October 4, 2011 By admin

By T.S. Donahue. Photos by Donn Young.

Chef Scott Crawford and NC artist Thomas Sayre

The Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood has been serving children in the Triangle region for 22 years, and recently five renowned chefs served nearly 150 guests in support of the center. The benefit, held at The Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary, NC, showcased a menu prepared by the Umstead’s executive chef Scott Crawford and was influenced by the works of North Carolina artist and sculpture Thomas Sayre. The dishes were accompanied by a select pairing of wines. Chef Steven Greene, of Heron’s at the Umstead Hotel and Spa, prepared reception hors d’oeuvres.

Sayre, known for his use, love and respect for natural materials, said that he was first skeptical about a dinner inspired by his works of art. That skepticism fell by the wayside after meeting with Crawford and his team of chefs. “My first response was ‘No,’ but after meeting with (the chefs) I started to see the possibilities and began wondering ‘How can we take this to a deeper place where something new might happen?’” said Sayre. “That’s really what the center is about – new beginnings; and the dinner needed to have the same inspiration.”

The preparation of Course One: Randomness.

The theme of the event was creative collaboration, said The Lucy Daniels Center board chair Dean McCord. “Creative collaboration is something that happens every day at The Lucy Daniels Center when our team of social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and educators work with children, their parents and members of the community who help make it all possible.”

The Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood is the largest and most comprehensive nonprofit agency providing children’s mental health services in the Triangle region of North Carolina. Began in 1989 with a gift from Lucy Daniels, the center serves more than 750 children and their families every year.

McCord, who says the center hopes for the benefit to become an annual event, told attendees the center doesn’t “offer cookie-cutter, quick-fix solutions, instead our highly skilled staff takes the time to sort out what the best course of treatment is for each child, whether it takes five visits or 500,” he said. “We provide services for … a high percentage of children from low and moderate-income families. About 1 in 7 children are treated at no cost and more than 90 percent pay less than the actual cost of providing services.”

The serving of Refined Smoke.

That is why the benefit is so important, according to McCord. “Our Family Support Fund must annually make up the difference between what families pay for services and the actual cost of providing them,” he said. “The center is not just about numbers (volume). The center is committed to providing a very high level of quality and service to every child that we treat, as well as their parents.”

McCord added that future plans for the center include more than doubling the number of children and families it is able to assist in the next 10 years to 2,000 children and families.

Throughout the meal, Sayre and Crawford expressed their thoughts on the dishes served and the inspiration behind them. Sayre said that “the dishes were prepared very well and everything turned out better than I could have imagined.”

Course One: Randomness

Course One: Randomness – Chef Scott Crawford, The Umstead Hotel and Spa

This dish included the random accompaniment of white and green asparagus spears, topped with a crispy ham hock, capped by a quail egg, and accompanied by an herb salad, tomato and Parmesan cheese. A beautiful dish, the lightness of the quail egg truly accentuated the perfectly fried ham hock. A tangy mustard-based sauce brought everything together in well-balanced explosion of flavor.

Course Two: Refined Smoke

Course Two: Refined Smoke – Chef Matthew Medure, Matthew’s San Marco and Restaurant Medure

Served under covered lid, which was removed from guest’s plates tableside, a burst of smoke momentarily veiled flawlessly cooked Maine scallops in a light pastry resting in a smoked vegetable Nage and topped with a Perigord Truffle Duxelle. The dish wasn’t as visually appealing as the rest of the dishes, but the smoky presentation, depth of character of the accompanying vegetable Nage and overall taste was amazing. The scallops literally melted in your mouth; and serving a ‘to-the-minute’ smoked dish to 150 people was not only impressive, it was done flawlessly.

Main Course: Earth's Influence

Main Course: Earth’s Influence – Chef Colin Bedford, Fearrington House

The hibiscus-marinated venison, wild mushroom and sage Cumberland sauce, beet, cocoa, cipollini, and sunchoke truly expressed the earthiness of Sayre’s works. The venison was tender, without any hint if gaminess. Visually appealing, the combination of unique flavors punched your palette in the face and you loved every minute of the experience.

Dessert: Serendipity

Dessert: Serendipity – Chef Daniel Benjamin, The Umstead Hotel and Spa

Dessert was accentuated by what Chef Crawford called “a happy accident” of caramelized white chocolate. The accompanying cinnamon toast, roasted apples and crème fraiche had the aroma of fall and inspired the senses towards all the season brings. Served on the right side of the dish, the white space on the plate made one feel as though something was missing, but upon the first mouthful everything seemed to be exactly where it belonged.

Overall the dinner was superb and delightfully done. The crowd expressed those thoughts with a standing ovation as Crawford took the stage alongside his team of chefs for a question and answer session at the end of the meal. Sayre agreed with the crowd’s enthusiastic response.

If the benefit does become an annual event, artsee Magazine highly recommends your future attendance.

Filed Under: Blog, Fundraiser, Special Exhibit

Critique: Venezia, photographs by Michael Venna

September 23, 2011 By admin

by Dr. Karen A. Heid

"Six Gondolas, Giardini ex Reali, Venice Italy, 1980" gelatin silver print, 21/45. Photo courtesy of Columbia Museum of Art.

Venice is most certainly not sinking. At least that is how one may feel when he or she sees Michael Kenna’s photographs of Venezia. Venice, the aesthete’s ideal of Italy, has been photographed by Kenna in such a way that he captures this ancient and fragile city as if it were rising from the depths of the marshy peninsula on which it was first built, revealing secrets that can only be seen through a lens.

Luminous, mysterious, and somewhat eerie, Kenna’s photographs suggest a city that is steeped in tradition and gratified by its own unique and ancient legacy. One feels the ebb and flow of the tide in the canals, the rise and fall of the Gondolas moored on antiquated quays, and the solitude of the buildings having been baked in the sun for centuries. At first there is a sense of loneliness in the depiction of each of the photographs. After quiet analysis, the loneliness is replaced by the sense of aloneness. The former suggests angst and the latter solitude, stillness, oneness, and thought.

Known for it’s watery and boat-laden streets, carnival masks, and magnificent glass, Venice is instead portrayed through Kenna’s photographic lens as a city that is quiet, asleep, and on the verge of awakening from a long slumber. With his quiet and patient method of photographing a sense of place, Kenna captures his own idiosyncratic explanation of the meaning of this city. His long exposures, sometimes lasting many hours during the darkest part of the night, are symbolic of the resulting quiet and patient images.

By working at night Kenna relinquishes the need for the sun as a single source of light and opts for light from the stars, moon, and man-made bulbs that come from many different directions. He terms his work “theatrical” when this kind of direct and indirect lighting creates the high drama of conversely washed-out areas and deep shadows. Working with medium format cameras without light meters since the early 1980s, Kenna is not bothered by the advance of technology. He is content with the critical process of film and believes that printmaking is the central component of his gelatin silver prints. His relatively small prints, like the artist’s relationship with his subject, invite the viewer to look closely – to step forward and have an intimate relationship with the work.

Michael Kenna’s Venezia can be seen at the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC through October 23, 2011. The Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday.

Filed Under: Blog, Critique, Museum Exhibit

Critique: Regardless of What You Think, paintings by Morag Charlton

September 23, 2011 By admin

by Chris Vitiello

"I absolutely love myself", 37" x 37" oil on linen. Image courtesy of Eno Gallery.

What can a single image do? What face do you present to the world? And what happens when your face proliferates throughout that world? Morag Charlton paints these questions large in Regardless of What You Think, a show of new portraiture—or perhaps it’s post-portraiture—now showing at the Eno Gallery in downtown Hillsborough.

Technically these are portraits of self-portraits. The subjects of Charlton’s large-scale oil paintings are the social networking profile pictures that late-teens and early 20-somethings have taken of themselves. Despite measuring more than a yard square, the linen surfaces are claustrophobic, cropped tight to faces. These giant thumbnails of young men and women capture their subject/object awkwardness in trying to photograph themselves with their laptop or phone cameras, simultaneously posing, framing, and clicking, always a little mistimed.

A serial artist who splits her time between studios in France and Raleigh, Charlton has taken a sharp turn from more traditional portraiture ranging from sketchy figure studies to allegorical portraits in classical poses that have located themselves stylistically between early Picasso and Leger. But recent cropped canvasses of wide-eyed sheep heads most directly inform the new paintings’ alignment with digital photography. And something in those animal eyes carries over into this new work: a simultaneous deadness and hunger that Charlton’s masterful brushstrokes do not temper.

The stakes are high for these young people, and Charlton’s transparent craft pays them a great amount of respect. These are their images, not hers. And if the sum of their images can be said to represent themselves to the world, what happens to that idea of self when half the gadgets they own have cameras in them, and hundreds or thousands of images can be taken and disseminated globally so easily and quickly?

These are desperate and conflicted lunges, as if these young people are trying to break through the screen to say they’re more than the pile of adjectives one might use to describe their expressions and poses. Charlton expresses her fascination with the strangeness of these zero-second performances in the weird, bluish fluorescent light of the screen. These are her children, friends, or strangers, abbreviated to a face and a flash, trying hard to be real in a virtual space. And Charlton refracts their spectrum of possibilities for identity through a prism-like intuition back into the realm of the real.

Regardless of What You Think at Eno Gallery in Hillsborough, NC, August 26 thru September 25, 2011. Visit Eno Gallery at www.enogallery.net for more information.

Filed Under: Blog, Critique, Gallery Exhibit