Once every decade, my life undergoes some sort of major metamorphosis. This time around, things happened about a year later than usual. Boy did I make up for that delay. For the past six months, I’ve been doing a lot of this:

Which has left me little time at all to do this:

 As matter of fact, the very last piece I painted was this:

                                                          "Chef's Shoes"  36 x 24 Mixed Media

It’s a pair of two-star Michelin chef Josiah Citrin’s chef shoes.  The irony is not lost on me that while painting this piece, I ended up spending a lot of time here in his kitchen:

As a matter of fact, I spent about 33 days straight in the kitchen of Melisse Restaurant, observing, absorbing and soaking up the following:

I  barely saw daylight.  Believe it or not, this left very little time to enjoy something like this:

In the midst of all this, I was presented with a life-changing opportunity that gave me two minutes to make a decision.  In less than four days I went from this:

To this:

It required some quick thinking and action. This decision brought me to  the other side of the country.  This sunny little apartment just blocks from the beach had my name written all over it:

It took me a few weeks to realize I was missing a lot of these:

As for O’Really?  She came along, but was put on a temporary leave of absence.  For those who suspect otherwise, here is proof of her existence:

She did manage to escape get out one night and do something she hadn’t done in years:

Her opponent was a very gracious sore  loser:

Back to the movies.  Life was getting extremely stressful as deadlines loomed for:

17-hour days became the norm.

I have lived, breathed, eaten and slept this project since January.  After six grueling months, it finally went from this:

To this:

Which means that next week when we sign off with the publisher, I can finally do this:

To think this journey all began with one chance meeting in the Louvre Museum in Paris back in 1987.   

“In Pursuit of Excellence” will be released in October 2011.

If somebody would have told me my first book would be a cookbook, I probably wouldn’t have believed it.  This has been the toughest, most challenging, exciting, demanding, exhausting and rewarding six months of my life. 

There were plenty of times I thought I was going to lose my mind or my cool (or both).  The moral of the story: