Hunter’s Moon by Miriam Schroers, 2021. Gouache, 11 x 14 inches.

Our recent project, Hunter’s Moon, is a tale of two quarantines: Erik, in Milan, drew the packaged soups he ate in isolation in his apartment, and used everyday food packaging to turn them into collage, connected by a pale palate of colors derived from life inside four walls. To accompany the collage, I wrote about escaping to the woods here in Connecticut, a place of solace as much as a place governed by danger, in the form of coywolves lurking at the perimeters. Though Erik and I are no longer in actual quarantine, those woods and those soups are still a part of our January lives. 

Often, I hike in these woods with my neighbor and friend, artist Miriam Schroers.  On one of these hikes, I asked her if she would do a painting for Zuppa Inglese: her own interpretation of Hunter’s Moon, to which she has a very personal connection. Our families are often together hiking, chasing our dogs, or sitting by a fire pit, as we do in the essay.

I love Miriam’s painting. I love that she applied her characteristic style to the elements of Hunter’s Moon that she recognized. On one side of an abandoned colonial stone wall in the woods, a wolf, some untamed brambles, and bush shaped like a flame; on the other, her little dog, a domesticated fire, a dark sky…and another wolf. 

I am grateful to have friends with whom I can create and share ideas, especially now when it is so hard to go out in the world and, well, do anything. And we hope that this painting can be the first of many collaborations on Zuppa Inglese, where other artists and friends might lend their own voices to the subject we love to explore: the edges and the meeting points of Italian and American experience. 

So what’s next? I think some soup is in order. A song about soup, or dance maybe? Yes please someone do a dance about soup. 

- J