A word from the illustrator

Taken from Vegetable Heaven, by Catherine Mason
(Pauntley Press, 2002, ISBN: 0-9534897-3-6, price £20.00)
Copyright © 2002 Catherine Mason

These things have a habit of coming out of the blue. When Catherine Mason phoned me and asked me if I would prepare sixty paintings to illustrate Vegetable Heaven, I was bowled over. For a start, the immensity of the project was breathtaking, but more than that, I wondered whether my style of painting was going to be right for it. I had acquired some small reputation for the Zen techniques I apply to flower painting, but – and I know this will sound odd – I had too little experience of vegetable painting to feel absolutely confident that my techniques would work for such very different subjects. I paint with inks and there are certain constraints in their use that make it hard to be certain in advance exactly how they will work with a given subject.

Then I met Catherine and I knew immediately that we could work together. Her knowledge of her subject, her enthusiasm for vegetarian cookery and her absolute conviction that she could deliver interesting, seductive, gourmet dishes was infectious. If she thought my work could complement that, I couldn't wait to get started.

I'd be lying if I didn't say it was tough. I had half guessed that trying to convey the sensual experience of good vegetarian cooking was not going to be easy, but I had underestimated the time it would take to get things right. For the paintings to work in a book like this, you try to capture the essence of what it is that makes the experience the recipe represents. Good food ravishes the senses. It is the combination of look, taste and smell that makes it special, so that is what you try to capture.

I work mostly at night. I do this because it's the time when the phone isn't ringing and I can concentrate on what I'm doing without distraction. Vegetable Heaven took more nights than I care to remember, as I realised that sixty paintings was probably only half of what I would have to do. Catherine had asked me for seventy so that she would have some choice, but I knew that that would not be enough. Not because I doubted my own work, but because with a project of this nature, it's important to get complete synergy between recipe and painting. And you only really know that you have achieved that when you start to assemble text and visuals together into a unified whole. So I created 142 paintings.

Now it's done, I look back on it with huge enjoyment. It's a wonderful project to have worked on and I only hope that readers get even half the enjoyment from this book that I have from working on it.

Elda Abramson
Eastbourne, 2002