Dear Feastlings,
40 years ago, I’d already been working in restaurants for a bit, but I hadn’t reckoned I’d still be doing it now. I was getting a Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art, which in retrospect was a near-perfect segue into the restaurant biz, though most folks with an artistic bent but a poor aptitude for self-promotion end up in front-of-the-house restaurant roles.
I was, as is many an art student, prone to whimsy and and fecklessness, but I wouldn’t trade my time as an art student for anything. I learned nothing that applies to the mechanics of what I do every day, but I also learned a boatload that informed my way of seeing the world for the next forty years of my life.
Sculpture was my emphasis, but of the three people most influential on my young brain, only one worked in 3-D, Susan Kay Johnson, and she was a visiting lecturer and instructor, so I only spent a year with her. The other two were painters, and neither one is with us any longer, but all three will be with me until I’m ravaged by dementia. There was Sue, for certain, and there were the two painters: one was Peggy Doogan, who taught me how to back up across the room from a painting and see it as a whole, from a perspective I’d been too close to see; and the other was Bruce McGrew, who taught me to look inside the work from inside my head, and to reevaluate it, from a perspective I’d been too far to see.
I’m lucky at Feast to have David Adix hanging art for us. I worked with David at Cafe Terra Cotta, where he was one of those folks with an artistic bent and a poor aptitude for self-promotion, waiting tables while I slung pizzas after studio classes in skylit rooms and Art History lectures in darkened rooms with slide carousels. David, though, gathered enough momentum to learn the art of self-promotion- and the promotion of others- to the point at which he could make a living from art. David has full reign of Feast’s walls, which has been fantastic for us all. Local artists get exposure to thousands of unsuspecting diners, Feast gets a steady rotation of free art, and David gets the exposure of his own work, and a commission that leaves the artist with more than they’d keep from a gallery.
This past Sunday, David came in with Paul Gold, who’d also been a student of Bruce’s even a couple of years before I had, and they hung our humble restaurant entirely with the work of a person who was like an amalgam of Santa Claus, Willy Wonka, the Pied Piper, Carlos Castañeda’s Don Juan, and- I don’t know- Francis Bacon? Henri Matisse? Claude Monet? Bruce McGrew’s work will hang here in the space of a student of his from half a lifetime ago, hung by another student of his from half a lifetime ago, through November first, and I’m lucky to have known him, and to peek into Joy Fox McGrew’s treasure trove of Bruce’s work from the seventies, eighties and nineties. And should you visit, you’ll be lucky too.
If it’s not the paintings that move you to join us,
https://paulgoldbooks.com/events-feast-on-bruce-mcgrew
we begin our August menu today,
https://www.eatatfeast.com/dining/menus/lunch-dinner/
and we have another wine tasting in the works,
and Ferragosto is a mere ten days from now.
Whichever your reason for joining us, be it art, food and drink, or camaraderie, we’re grateful to have you here, and with any luck, we’ve stepped back enough, or looked inside enough, to look at our food and drink in a way that you haven’t already, and that will have been worth the trip.
Your friend,
Doug