“It’s All in the Ingredients”
Judith Motzkin

Digital paintings made from Toscanini’s ice cream recipes

When Gus Rancatore and I first talked about a show in his flagship ice creamery on Main Street, he told me that he always wanted to see some large work on his clean brick walls. At the time, I was working on a series of digital images drawn from my tea and stone series’ of mixed media wall pieces. I had just made the first of a series of object-scan prints using Photoshop as a painting tool and my own clay stones as source.

As the idea simmered, it came to me that I was interested in recasting the ingredients of some favorite ice cream flavors as large format digital images. I started with the flavor "khulfee", an Indian blend of cardomom and pistachios. Then I moved to Chocolate Sluggo, the richest combinations of chocolates and cookies.

So here it is: a palette of chocolates, cookies, nuts, creams and other liquids captured in pixels and digitally combined into fluid abstract images. The images are printed on an Iris inkjet printer on quality printmaking paper.

Central Square is a neighborhood with a unique blend of color, texture, and flavor. Coffee and khulfee, CAOS and Carnival. As an artist, I find meaning in using the ingredients of my life as source. Central Square and Cambridgeport--where I live and raise kids, where I annually open my studio, work, copy, bank, mail, eat, walk, talk, write, garden, and draw--are home. It is delightful for me to do work with source and presentation this close to home.

Limited edition prints are available in various sizes.

“It’s All in the Ingredients”

Digital paintings made from Toscanini Ice Cream recipes by artist: Judith Motzkin
were first shown September 10 – October 31, 2005 at
Toscanini’s Ice Cream
899 Main Street, Central Square, Cambridge MA 02139

Ice cream meets art as Cambridge artist Judith Motzkin has taken the ingredients of Central Square’s famous and extraordinary ice cream to a new place. Starting with her favorite flavor, khulfee, she has captured its ingredients—nuts, cardamom, and condensed milk—in pixels and combined them into fluid abstract images.

The artist considers this work a collaboration of food and art. The New York Times and Gourmet Magazine have lauded Toscanini’s Ice Cream as one of the best in the world. The palette of chocolates, nuts, and cookies in Toscanini owner Gus Rancatore’s signature Chocolate Sluggo flavor, when mixed with the artist’s hand, recall the ceramic forms and serendipitous colors and surfaces for which Motzkin has been recognized.

Toscanini’s Ice Cream: www.tosci.com