"Comfort Food" Patrick Bahls

For three weeks in May I worked with students on the mathematics of art.  This course met both quantitative reasoning and art requirements of the curriculum.  In this short class, the students learned about golden rectangles, Fibonacci, rotations, translations and other mathematical concepts and applied those to creating art.  You can see their work and some of their thoughts about it on out blog.

May Term is not very long, and we packed in the study of Mondrian, Escher, Leher, LeWitt and other artists.  They created origami, kirigami, paintings, drawings, sculptures and computer-generated art.  We didn't get to spend as much time as I would like on what qualifies as art (as in the question "When is a quilt art and when it is just a blanket?"), but there seemed to be a consistent message from the students that art evokes emotion, either positive or negative, and brings to mind other images and thoughts.  In particular, the art of Brent Collins made some students uncomfortable while others found it calming, but all were affected by the sculpture.

Patrick's short poem, "Comfort Food" published in the Summer 2012 edition of The Adirondack Review brought many images to mind.  Coincidentally, I was eating a slice of cheese pizza from Wynn's, one of my comfort foods, when I found his link on Facebook and read the poem.  The first food he mentions is boiled dinner, a source of comfort from my own childhood, although ours used a ham bone from Sunday's dinner and was always garnished with apple cider vinegar.

The poem sent me on a mental journey of the comfort foods I had discovered in other countries.  Sticky buns filled with pork in Beijing, bean papusas in San Salvador, fish tacos from a street vendor in Puerto Vallarta, rasam and naan in Madras, and, most recently, medialunas in Rosario.  Comfort food gives you something to come home to even when you are not at home.

Thanks, Patrick.