a painting each day

i'm so pleased to have found artist ann elizabeth schlegel's painting-a-day-blog. i happened upon it while in the numb state i was in a couple days ago, after i heard about daisy from kay. i loved the way ms. schlegel rendered everyday objects like bottles of tabasco and boxes of good-n-plenty. when i found the painting of the milkbone dog biscuits, with its colors so true i could remember sneaking a bite of one in secret as child, and with daisy's memory so close and stinging, i was beside myself.

one thing that i think sets ann elizabeth apart from other painting-a-day weblogs is that she accompanies each original oil painting with a little history of the thing she has painted. so along with the milkbones, there is the story of milkbones:

"Milk-Bone is a brand of dog biscuit. It was created in 1908 by the F. H. Bennett Biscuit Company, which operated a bakery on the Lower East Side of New York City. Originally named Maltoid, the biscuit was a bone-shaped treat made from minerals, meat products, and milk. Sometime between 1915 and 1926 the biscuit was simply named "Milk-Bone", owing to the high composition of cow's milk. In 1931 the bakery was acquired by the National Biscuit Company (now Nabisco). The biscuit was the only Bennett product carried over after the acquisition.

Over the next few decades, the Milk-Bone was expanded to include a number of different flavors. The marketing focus was also shifted from Milk-Bone being merely a dog treat to a product that promoted cleaner teeth and better breath. Nabisco, under the ownership of Kraft Foods, sold the Milk-Bone rights over to Del Monte Foods of San Francisco, California in May of 2006."


the milkbone painting is sold, but there are many others, just as wonderful, each one saturated with its own deliciousness to memory, each just a hundred dollars to have as your own.