Mass. (finally) represented in seafood cook-off

Local chef heads for Big Easy cook-off

By Taryn Plumb |  Globe Correspondent 

July 28, 2013

Josh Reynolds for The Boston Globe 

Paul Turano had always enjoyed watching and reading about the Great American Seafood Cook-Off , which is held annually in New Orleans. But over the years, he realized that Massachusetts didn’t have much of a representation, if any.
Which he found surprising: This is, after all, the home of clam chowder, fresh lobster, haddock, and the reality TV show “Wicked Tuna.”
So he decided to give it a try.
Turan, the owner of Tryst restaurant in Arlington and the future Cook restaurant in Newton, has been nominated by Governor Deval Patrick to compete alongside 15 other chefs from around the country in the 10th installment of the cook-off, taking place Saturday at the Big Easy’s Morial Convention Center .

“My game plan is to just cook everything properly, present it on a really nice plate, and showcase New England seafood,” said the 38-year-old father of two, who lives in Canton.

Every year, the event draws chefs prepared to showcase their state’s domestic seafood — whether it’s Louisiana’s legendary catfish, inlet clams from Florida, or wild rockfish from Delaware.
Their dishes are scrutinized by a panel of six judges from around the country, and the winner is crowned king (or queen) of American seafood.
Each contestant has to be nominated by their state’s governor.
Last year’s winner was Gregory Gourdet, chef at the Departure Restaurant and Lounge in Portland, Ore., who offered up his state’s official fish — Chinook salmon — slow-cooked and served with butter clams, bacon dashi, pickled porcini, roasted heirloom tomatoes, and crisped sea greens, according to the event’s website (www.greatamericanseafoodcookoff.com).
But as far as Betsy Wall, executive director of the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism, is concerned, the coveted title should be an easy catch for Turano.
She described his menus, preparation, and presentation as renowned in her entry letter, and added that “to save time, you might as well award the crown to Chef Turano, who is sure to win the competition.”
She wrote that Massachusetts, with its “very vibrant” fishing industry, takes seafood “very seriously.”
Yet since 2008, only three chefs from New England have participated in the cook-off, and all were from Maine. This year, the region will also be represented by chef Rizwan Ahmed of Hourglass Brasserie in Bristol, R.I.
Turano plans to offer up a summertime lobster salad drizzled with his variation on tartar sauce, accompanied by sweet corn pudding with fava beans, and fried stuffed oysters served inside a squash blossom.
The idea is to create a “spin on seafood salad,” and have the dish “really screaming summer,” he said.
He and his competitors will have only one hour to prepare their dishes on Saturday.
“I love fish,” said Turano. “I like simple fish presentations.”
Still, he stresses that, throughout his cooking, he likes to mix it up. “I try not to pigeon-hole myself into any style,” he said.
He described himself growing up in Stoughton as a “chubby little kid” who liked to eat (and still does), watched Julia Child and Jeff Smith (“The Frugal Gourmet”), and regularly cooked up pork chops, chicken cutlets, and homemade French fries.
“It’s all I ever wanted to do,” he said. “I knew this was going to be my career path since I was 5 years old. I’ve always loved to surround myself with food, and now I do it for a living.”
After receiving his degree in culinary arts from Newbury College in 1995, Turano worked at various country clubs, then for a time ran the 30-seat bistro Olio in Canton.
His next venture, the 80-seat Cook, is set to open within a few weeks.
All told, he said, “fresh, seasonal scratch cooking is my passion.
“I don’t like to pull things out of bags. I like to do it from scratch, I like to deal with the raw product.”

Original story link. 

© 2013 The New York Times Company

hack/reduce: Boston is the future hub of big data

Jul 26, 2013

Startups & Venture Capital

Nonprofit goes the distance with ‘hackathons’

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

 
W. Marc Bernsau

At hack/reduce, the nonprofit center in Cambridge focused on big-data exploration, the Boston area has a chance to “take back our place in tech history,” says center co-founder Chris Lynch.
A major part of that effort is running events such as “hackathons,” in which groups of people with software expertise come together to write new applications over the course of a few hours or days.
In late June, hack/reduce hosted the first-ever hackathon with the U.S. Department of Defense, a 24-hour event that challenged its 100-plus participants to create nutritionally focused apps for soldiers.
The winners, a group of four UMass Lowell students — three computer science majors and one nutritional science major — garnered a $3,000 prize for creating the Android-based app MARTEE (Mobile Access Rations Tracking and Energy Expenditure). Serving as a training tool for soldiers going into the field, it includes full nutritional data on combat rations personalized to their height, weight and activities. The group drew, sketched and did the planning before the coding, said team member Mike Stowell; they then split the work while still collaborating on design choices, until “we finally reached the best product we could make in 24 hours.”
“If anything, I learned the limits of my focus and patience,” said fellow team member Jeremy Poulin. “I learned what it feels like to push myself beyond my own expectations. Our group basically didn’t stop working for the full 24 hours.”
Going forward, the goal is to host even more hackathons based around varying themes, executive director Adrienne Cochrane said. “We’re always looking to provide access to more and more interesting technologies and data,” she said.
According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day — and 90 percent of the data now in the world has been created in the last two years. And more and more corporate, government and nonprofit organizations are looking to tap big data for marketing, research and insights.
Looking ahead, Lynch would like to see Boston generating a thousand data scientists a year, and within 10 years, no fewer than three, $1-billion companies in the space in the Boston area.
“We need more EMCs in New England if we’re going to make a difference in the tech community,” said Lynch, a partner at Atlas Venture in Cambridge who previously headed database tech firm Vertica Systems, which was bought by HP in 2011.
Hack/reduce is backed by more than $1 million from more than a dozen sponsors, including Google, Atlas Venture and Microsoft. Lynch says the center houses roughly 50 “residents” — people who have skills in big data and are approved by hack/reduce — per day. The residents, who get free desk space and access to technology and data sets, wrestle with the three basic barriers to solving big-data problems — scale, security and simplicity.
“We want to be flourishing with new opportunity that not only is good for residents of Massachusetts, but the world,” Lynch said. “We need to be a leader, and take back our place in tech history.”

Original story link. 

Not happy with the way you look in photos?

Jul 19, 2013

Startups & Venture Capital

Pixtr develops clear picture for growth

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal 

 

W. Marc Bernsau

Most people are highly critical of the way they look in photos. Aviv Gadot’s wife certainly is — a fact that prompted the Israeli engineer to create an app, Pixtr, that enhances photos taken on mobile devices.
“It does it subtly,” said Gadot, CEO and co-founder of the startup of the same name. “We don’t want to change who you are. We want to make you look the best you can, but still keeping your authentic look.”
Founded in January 2012 in Israel as Photo-Genie, the company is now headquartered in Boston after its acceptance into the 2013 MassChallenge startup program. Pixtr has also secured a prominent angel investor: Uri Levine, co-founder of navigational app firm Waze, which Google reached an agreement to acquire for $1.1 billion in June.
Gadot declined to disclose the size of Levine’s investment, but termed it an “impressive amount.” The startup, now with five full-time employees, also received $20,000 in prize money for placing first in the Intel Business Challenge Europe 2011 program.
How the Pixtr app works: Users run a photo through the app, which then enhances it with one click. For example, skin tone might be evened out, hollows beneath eyes lightened, the symmetry and proportions of cheek bones, noses, and jawlines subtly adjusted, eyebrows clipped, and camera distortions and overall coloring improved.
As Gadot explained, the app makes use of facial recognition software and numerous algorithms designed to understand age, gender, the location and quality of facial features, and the content of photos.
“Everything is fully automatic,” Gadot said.
He has more than 1,000 photos stored on his iPhone, and described his wife as beautiful, but someone who really hates pictures of herself. In creating the app, he says he “wanted her to feel good about the way she looks in photos.”
The app is free and currently only available in Apple iOS. The company is focusing its energy on perfecting it before releasing it on Android. Since its release at the end of April, it’s been downloaded close to 100,000 times, Gadot said. A forthcoming updated version will allow users to make changes to, and have more control over, the automatic adjustments.
The plan is to eventually generate revenue through advertising through the app, Gadot said, and the startup is also exploring the idea of in-app purchases, such as captions and backgrounds.
Ultimately, with more people relying on ever-more-improving cameras on their phones, the goal is to give amateur photographers editing abilities, and have the end result look like it was taken by a professional, Gadot said.
“It’s Photoshop for people who don’t know how to use Photoshop,” said Rebecca Carrol, a Brown University student who uses the app and is involved with the internship program Boston Onward Israel. “It’s just really simple — that’s why I like it.”

Original story link. 

Rebirth on the Sudbury River

From the Nyanza disaster comes renewal

By Taryn Plumb |  Globe Correspondent   July 18, 2013

Jackie Ricciardi for The Boston Globe

SUDBURY — Clutched carefully between two sets of hands, the dark-winged, white-bellied bird offered the littlest bit of resistance — just a flutter here and there.
The two men gently handling the roughly 6-inch-long veery, a member of the thrush family, on a recent damp and overcast morning took just a few minutes to band its legs and secure a miniature geolocator on its back. Then they sent the bird back on its way amid the mist and the mosquitoes.
The songbird is one of 45 from a number of species that the Gorham, Maine-based Biodiversity Research Institute hopes to capture and tag throughout the Sudbury River watershed this summer. The effort is part of a conservation focused network of projects born from the environmental calamity of the Nyanza Superfund site in Ashland.
“We need to know where they’re going for the winter,” said Evan Adams, the institute’s migratory bird program director, and one of the veery’s taggers at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. “We need to make sure the breeding grounds are right, the migrating routes are right, the wintering grounds are right. We need to be thinking about their whole life cycle.”

From a disaster now comes a renewal: For decades, the 35-acre site of the Nyanza Color and Chemical Co. in Ashland was a literal dumping ground. Mercury, used solvents, chemical waste, and heavy metals were disposed of and buried, or simply allowed to leak into the ground, on the property. The location became one of the country’s first Superfund sites, and in 1998, Nyanza representatives settled for $3 million with state and federal entities in an attempt to mitigate its legacy of contamination.

Now, 15 years later, 11 projects are underway to study, restore, and improve — as well as provide access to and education about — the Sudbury River and its watershed area, at a proposed cost of $4.72 million (some of that funding coming not only from the settlement, but from various local, state, and federal entities).
One of the largest projects, with an expected cost of nearly $1.5 million, is the attempted control of two invasive plants, purple loosestrife and water chestnut, along the Sudbury, Concord, and Assabet rivers.
Both plants essentially choke out native species and eventually create a “monoculture,” according to US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Molly Sperduto, and they eliminate key habitats and food sources for native wildlife.
For the water chestnut, which covers the surface of waterways in large, seemingly impenetrable green masses, settlement money is being used to pay volunteers to hand-pull it from certain areas. Meanwhile, for other areas, the plan is to purchase an aquatic harvester to mechanically remove it. The effort is currently using a harvester — a giant, bright-orange contraption with paddle wheels, a cutter head, and conveyor — on loan from the Fish and Wildlife Service.
“It is successful,” biological technician Amber Carr said as she stood by the harvester, docked next to a bridge near Great Meadows. “You just have to be persistent.”
For the purple loosestrife, which Sperduto described as an unfortunately pretty “haze of purple” that takes over wetland areas, the best line of defense is a natural predator: the leaf beetle galerucella calmariensis.
Housed behind the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge’s visitor center in Sudbury is a rearing facility for the insects: 50 pots of the plants spread out across five blue kiddie pools, covered with netting to keep the beetles in and their predators out.
According to Katrina Scheiner, a Fish and Wildlife Service intern, there are between 500 and 1,000 beetles per pot. But in the watershed, there are thousands of acres of the invasive plant. So once ideal sites are chosen, the plants and beetles are put out, pot and all.
Uncovering one of the netted plants, Scheiner carefully picked off a beetle, brown and tiny, about three-eighths of an inch long. The insect’s larvae does the most damage, eating the loosestrife’s top buds and keeping it from flowering, she explained, pointing out the plant’s brown and shriveled leaves, and others dotted with holes.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, just inside the Great Meadows gates, Adams and his crew were at work capturing and tagging birds. The goal, he explained, is to fit geolocators, which track locations by recording changes in light levels, on a mix of veeries, gray catbirds, Eastern kingbirds, and orioles.
The hope is that at least a few of them will winter or stop over in southern Belize, where the $75,000 project also includes reforesting five, 30-acre plots of cleared land with cacao trees, which provide nesting and feeding habitat for migratory and resident songbirds.
Then, next year, the team will return to the watershed to recapture as many tagged birds as they can, detach the geolocators, and collect the information they contain about the bird’s travels.
Adams said restoration, management, and conservation plans are often centered around breeding grounds, rather than migration grounds, which are just as important to a particular species’ life. Particularly in the case of the veery, populations are declining because their wintering areas in South America are being developed, he said.
On this day, his team started at 4 a.m. Moving through muddy areas and sometimes thick brush, they rotated three, roughly 35-foot-long fine mesh nets accompanied by sound systems, repeating veery territorial calls.
By around 7:30, they had captured and tagged one male and one female; soon another male was ensnared. Adams called it an “after-second-year” bird, one that had “likely been here before, bred before, and been back.”
After extricating the bird, Adams and Patrick Keenan worked together to band its legs with a red-aluminum-black color combination — so they can identify it next year — then outfitted it with the geolocator “backpack.’’ As Adams attached the tiny device with a knotted, superglued band, Keenan kept the bird still by holding its neck in the wedge of space between his index and middle fingers — wide enough to fit the bird’s neck without injuring it.
At times the bird shifted and fluttered, but it was generally quiet.
When the job was done, the bird was given a few minutes in a darkened cage on the ground; time to stand, move around, flap its wings, calm down, and readjust.
Adams then retrieved the bird, checked the device once more, then knelt with the veery nestled on his open palm.
The bird puffed its feathers, looked around, and then flew off, low to the ground.
“You let them leave whenever they want,” Adams said as it disappeared into the brush. He nodded approvingly. “He’s flying strong.”

Nyanza settlement project

July 18, 2013

Breakdown of projects funded in whole or in part by the Nyanza Superfund settlement:
■ $1.49 million for aquatic weed control in the Sudbury, Concord, and Assabet rivers.
■ $1.42 million for land acquisitions in the Sudbury River corridor.
■ $540,000 to create the Stearns and Brackett Reservoirs Wildlife Preserve in Ashland and Framingham.

■ $425,000 to study habitat restoration for diadromous fish — species that migrate between fresh and salt water — to the Concord River.

■ $300,000 to restore cold- water fish habitats.
■ $161,000 to construct a boardwalk and wildlife observation platform on the Red Maple Trail at Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.
■ $145,000 to create a public access point on the Sudbury River.
■ $120,000 to educate children about the watershed through the Sudbury RiverSchools program.
■ $75,000 to restore migratory songbird habitat in Belize and study migration.
■ $34,000 to restore the habitat of the Sudbury Valley Trustees’ North Field property.
■ $7,000 for improvements to Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge headquarters.
SOURCES: Stratus Consulting; Nyanza NRD Trustee Council

Original story link. 

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Attendance 2.0

Jul 12, 2013

Startups & Venture Capital

Attendware: Making attendance count

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal 

 

Sandie Allen

At the regular weekly meetings of the Entrepreneurs Club at Northeastern University, Greg Skloot remembers looking out at a mass of faces and thinking, “I don’t know any of these people.”
So, he decided to design a way to find out. The initial result was the simply-titled “Signin App” — students, upon entering, would provide their name, major and graduation year. Club leadership could then track attendance trends, week-to-week.
First developed by Skloot at Northeastern in September 2012, that initial application has since evolved into a broader software offering for event management. And Skloot’s Boston startup, Attendware, is now commercializing the software.
“There’s a white space in the events world around making some of these on-site processes, like attendance and name tags, work more smoothly,” said Skloot, who graduated from Northeastern in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
Founded in March, Attendware is backed by a $1 million Series A round from .406 Ventures, announced in late June. It counts among its customers Northeastern, Mount Holyoke College and MassChallenge, with several other contracts pending, according to Skloot. Attendware earns revenue from annual licenses for the software.
“It’s a very simple product,” Skloot said. “(But) it solves a lot of old-school pain points.”
Through desktop and Web apps — with an iPad app forthcoming — the software offers a digital sign-in for guests, then instantly prints out name tags. Organizers can then receive real-time analytics and custom demographic breakdowns about their guests, can track flagged “VIPs,” and create automated email surveys.
As Skloot noted, collecting attendance data doesn’t sound that complex — but it is, as he knows from experience as the one-time president of NU’s Entrepreneurs Club. He joined as a freshman, when it had fewer than a dozen members. Over the years, he helped grow it into a burgeoning enterprise, with more than 150 members, a leadership team of 25, and a yearly budget of $35,000.
But because the group relied on “disorganized spreadsheets,” he found it difficult to extract any insights or trends from its regular events.
“Making data more available is very helpful and new for events people,” he said, noting that the goal of Attendware is to make it “as easy as possible” for customers to gain “deep insight” on how to improve their events.
That has been a crucial takeaway for Northeastern’s Center for Research Innovation, directed by Tracey Dodenhoff. The center holds a Research, Innovation and Scholarship Expo every year. This March, it used Attendware’s software to sign-in and track its roughly 2,000 attendees. Previously, guests didn’t register, Dodenhoff said, “so we never knew who was coming and going.”
But by finally having that data, they now know where to concentrate their marketing efforts for next year — specifically on alumni, she said, as there weren’t as many in attendance as they’d previously assumed.
So, ultimately, while Attendware is easy to use and adds a “layer of professionalism” to an event, she said, because of the data it provides, “it’s about much more than just the logistics of registering.”

Original story link. 

Shipping containers the new vehicle for growth

Jul 5, 2013 

Startups & Venture Capital

Freight Farms sees right climate for growth

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal 

 

W. Marc Bernsau 

If Boston-based Freight Farms has its way, shipping containers could be the preferred vehicle of the future for fresh food production. The startup, founded in 2010, has repurposed standard shipping containers into hydroponic laboratories that can be installed anywhere.
As CEO and co-founder Brad McNamara explained, the five-employee company is starting small, but has much loftier goals.
“We want to take local food global,” he said, “and shift from a broken global food system to a sustainable solution.”
Making use of LED lighting and digital controls, the units grow food vertically, floor-to-ceiling, by the cubic foot, and require only eight hours a week of maintenance, McNamara said.
But this work can grow an acre’s worth of food. “It’s an enormous level of plant density in there,” McNamara said.
The company now has one unit on the market, a “leafy green machine,” that grows anything from lettuce, to mint, to arugula. In the forthcoming months, it will release a “vine veggie factory,” and a “fresh fungi factory.” It also offers solar modification packages, and plans to work with partners to make renewable options more accessible.
McNamara and co-founder Jonathan Friedman struck upon the idea while consulting on hydroponic rooftop design in 2009. Although McNamara had been growing hydroponically on his own, he and Friedman soon realized that rooftop greenhouses weren’t going to be scalable enough to even begin to address wider-reaching food-production needs.
But shipping containers, on the other hand, are not only prevalent around the world, McNamara said, but highly transportable, sealed, insulated, and designed to be stacked.
“It’s the perfect growing condition in any climate — you just put it down, plug it in, add water,” he said.
A participant in the 2013 spring session of TechStars Boston, Freight Farms was initially supported by a $31,000 Kickstarter campaign in December 2011. The startup is currently raising an estimated $1.2 million seed round that it hopes to close this summer, McNamara said.
The company has also closed on about $450,000 in sales over the past three months, he said. Customers buy the containers outright, at a cost of about $60,000 apiece. Then, for a monthly subscription, Freight Farms provides them with everything they need for production.
The startup has six units now in use, McNamara said, with commitments by buyers for another dozen or so. The eventual goal is to bring the farming systems to developed countries and other areas facing various food-production issues.
Ted Katsiroubas, co-owner of Boston-based fruit and produce supplier Katsiroubas Bros., is among Freight Farms’ customers. His company makes use of two stacked units: The bottom serves as a storage and packing area, while the top grows basil — a staple item that it ships regularly.
Being a Boston company, “we could never have the opportunity to have a ton of land (or) a field of products,” he said. But this “allows anybody to grow in an urban setting,” and, in the case of a sensitive item like basil, increases shelf-life, he said.
“What I’m excited about is the opportunity to work with other growers,” Katsiroubas said. “I’m just one piece of what’s going to turn into a big cluster, or hive, of units in New England.”

Original story link.

Have a drink and create some art!

Paint and sip studios reveal the inner artist

By Taryn Plumb |  Globe Correspondent  
July 04, 2013

Jackie Ricciardi for The Boston Globe

Bridgette Riggin will be the first to tell you she is absolutely devoid of artistic ability; she has trouble creating presentable-looking stick figures, and jokes that her abilities are so bereft that her husband won’t even let her anywhere near a blank wall in their home with paintbrushes and rollers.
Still, the Stow mom has managed to create a half-dozen canvases that she’s proud enough to display around her house — bucolic scenes of grist mills and red barns; elegant flowers; whimsical cupcakes.
Such is the aim of so-called “paint and sip” studios – to, layer by layer, reveal everyone’s inner artist (accomplished or not).
“I can’t paint,” Riggin, an effervescent blonde, said with a laugh on a recent night at Maynard’s Paint ’n Pour. “But when I come through these doors, I become Picasso.”

Having started out in the South, the “paint and sip” trend has slowly made its way north, and is now burgeoning in Greater Boston. There’s the well-known Paint Bar in Newton, Palettes in Natick, and Paint ’n Pour, which opened in May 2012. Paint Misbehavin’ is to be the newest entrant on the scene; it’s expected to open in Hudson by early September.

“It’s geared toward people who have no idea what they’re doing,” said Suzanne Henderson, who welcomes about 70 to 100 people a week to Paint ’n Pour, between public events and private parties (bachelorettes, birthdays, bridal and baby showers).
It’s just like it sounds: Participants are provided with canvases, paint, and brushes, and, as they sip wine or beer — which is BYOB or offered via a bartender, depending on the studio — are given step-by-step instructions to create a painting, whether it be a Monet homage, or a simple landscape or still life. Sessions are typically two to three hours, and everyone comes away at the end with their own work of art.
“For me, painting is really therapeutic: Putting the colors on the canvas, watching them interact — I want people to look at the canvas and go, ‘I can’t believe I just did that,’ ” said Dave Rosolko, owner of Paint Misbehavin’.
He is creating all the designs himself — from sailboats, to the Grand Canyon, to abstracts and pop art — and expects to offer four sessions a week to start.
A MassArt graduate who has spent the last 35 years in graphic arts, Rosolko said he hopes the endeavor eventually allows him to offer intermediate and advanced classes for the more accomplished artists who happen to come through.
“You never know where the next van Gogh is going to come from,” he said.
Still, in most cases, the goal is to simply introduce art to those who otherwise wouldn’t interact with it (beyond, say, a visit to the museum).
“People are nervous, but when they leave, they’re so surprised and thrilled that they did it,” said Henderson, who isn’t classically trained, but said she always had a “knack” for painting. “It’s making people happy. No one ever leaves in a bad mood, including me.”
Like Rosolko, she creates all the designs herself (typically 16-inches by 20-inches), changing them with the seasons; on a recent evening, they covered the walls of her studio – Newbury Street at night; a peacock feather; empty beach chairs below a bobbing kite; van Gogh’s “Starry Night”; a sailboat in silhouette at sunset.
Colorful wine bottles also lined the windows, sporadically sprouting large fake blooms; the beloved PBS painter Bob Ross was also present in a framed photograph.
On this particular night, the challenge was “Pink bloom,” a close-up of a flower tinged with yellow, red, and orange streaks.
As participants arrived, everyone retrieved a black apron, palette of paint – with globs of white, deep yellow, bright red, raw sienna, dark blue, and chrome orange – and bundle of four brushes, and got comfortable at a seat in front of a canvas on an easel.
Amy Van de Water of Shirley, who settled in at the back of the room, said she’s not much of a painter, but likes crocheting, following a pattern.
“It’s definitely a way of bridging that gap – having instruction without it being paint-by-number,” she said.
Nearby sat Abigail Carman of Maynard, toting along her boyfriend, Matthew Kier, and sister, Nina Carman of Framingham.
“It’s relaxing, honestly,” Abigail Carman said with a shrug as she sipped Moscato. “You paint, have some fun, see how terrible you are.”
Whatever your abilities are, though, it’s ultimately an outlet, she added. “You don’t have a lot of time to be creative in your everyday life.”
Her boyfriend, meanwhile, when asked what he hoped to get out of the evening, shrugged and quipped, “I want my painting to be better than hers.”
Carman laughed. “That’s real love.”
Groups of two, three, and four continued to filter in, eventually drinking from beer bottles or plastic cups.
Henderson eventually took her place on a raised platform at the center of the room, starting out by asking if this was a first time for anyone. Four or five hands tentatively went up.
She stressed that it’s “fun art, not fine art,” and laid down one ground rule: There is to be “no negativity here.”
Then, she guided the group in the simplest terms; starting with a medium-sized brush, she instructed, “dip that into your cup of water – not your wine.”
Then, with a few strokes, they each created a half-circle of yellow at the bottom center of their canvases. After, they mixed red and white to create their own versions of pink – someone in the crowd joking that “mine looks like Pepto-Bismol” – and outlined petals; after that, they mixed purple to fill in white areas.
All the while, they chatted, music playing, champagne corks popping. Over the course of their work, some commented mockingly, “What have I done?” or joked, “All it does is make me want to cry!”
Quickly, though, things started to take shape; from a distance, the canvases looked the same, but upon closer inspection, the personal flourishes emerged – different shades of pink and purple, petals varying in shape and size, width, overlap. Some were abstract; others bushy.
Riggin, sharing a Cabernet with neighbor Betsy Foley, has been eight or nine times, she said, bringing different friends and even her 6-year-old.
“It makes you see your potential,” she said between brush strokes. “It takes someone who says, ‘I can’t paint,’ and tells them, ‘Yes you can.’ ”

Original story link here.