Skip to main content

Ted Maczka

Ted's eyes seem to tell it all.

Also known as the "Fish Lake Garlic Man," Ted is so famous around Prince Edward County that I could have just used this close-up as his portrait and people around here would probably still recognize him.

Ted came to Canada in the 1970s and it was while working in a non-agricultural job that he learned that Canada imported its garlic from China. After looking into this further, Ted came to the conclusion that there was no reason Canada could not be self-sufficient in garlic since our climate was ideal for growing it. He then took it upon himself to become an evangelist for garlic and, since 1978, apart from operating his wildly successful garlic farm, he's been interviewed and featured in dozens of papers and on nearly as many TV programs across the country and abroad (he showed me several binders of clippings).

A strong advocate of locally-grown garlic, Ted's entirely self-taught with regards to the scientific research into all aspects of it, regularly helping out (and correcting!) governmental agricultural research.

It was only fitting that I paint him wearing a garland of his beautiful garlic (incorporated from a photo he supplied).

Ted's famous garlic.
Plant in fall before frost.

After our photo shoot, Ted gave me a bulb of garlic which was then split up into its separate cloves and planted in a large pot. A few months later, by early March, sprouts were coming up and now the garlic is ready to transplant into our garden. The photo below was taken in the midst of writing this post (just after 10am, 10 May 2011).

Garlic ready for transplanting.


Garlic now transplanted.

For fun, here's an MRI of some garlic from a great blog by Andy Ellison.

Shirt area detail.
I tried to make this look as flannelly as possible;
seeing the weave of the canvas helps.

Ted's ear.

I love cropping areas that look like abstract, impressionistic paintings.


Garlic Man in progress.
Note the orange acrylic underpainting evident in the head area.



UPDATE:
This painting is now part of the County of Prince Edward Library and Archives collection.

See the full version of it  HERE.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi
4 comments
Read more

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th
Post a Comment
Read more

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co
Post a Comment
Read more