Welcome to The Freaky Table
This is a newsletter that inherits and continues my work with The Freaky Table, my old blog founded in 2015. It aims to be a space to share family stories, recipes, and photographic content about my “unconventional” world where Art and Kitchen often meet, intersect, and inspire each other.
The table is the place that hosts conversations, meetings, meals, recipe preparations (both cookery and atelier), still lifes to be photographed or painted.
About me
My name is Zaira Zarotti, I am writing from Venice, Italy, where I was born and raised in a family of Venetian artists.
I don't like to call myself an artist, but I have been living off my art for almost a decade.
I have an art background and a major in photography.
I am a photographer and I work in the still life, food & wine industry. I am a native Italian (and Venetian!) speaker, I learned English by reading cooking blogs, that's why sometimes maybe you will come across some mistakes.
I share my life with an artist who prefers to call himself “artisan”. We have a daughter, and together we founded a ceramics studio where we create design objects for the table inspired by the Venice lagoon. We lead a simple, shared life in our country home a few miles from Venice and its lagoon, which we often sail aboard a small traditional wooden boat. When we are not in Venice we are in Tuscany, our second home.
What you will find here
Stories about our lifestyle (both in Venice and Tuscany) as a family of artists, and about our creations whether they are photographs, ceramics, or paintings. Recipes and conversations about food and Art, kitchen and atelier, defined as art space - artist's studio.
You will find authentic, tested, and often history-rich recipes from regional Italian cuisine and in particular from Venice and Tuscany. Culinary inspirations, ideas, entire seasonal menu.
I'll share my knowledge on recipe preparation for cooking or for the artist, based on natural, spontaneous, and often harvested ingredients. Wild collections of herbs, flowers, and edible plants in the Venetian and Tuscan countryside. How to preserve and use them both in the kitchen and the artist's atelier... such as clay, natural pigments, and organic elements that find their use in the world of fine arts.
Insider reports and tips on the places we experience daily. Venice seen from an authentic and uncommon point of view, such as through lagoon explorations by boat.
Thoughts and conversations about creativity, motherhood as a creative, artist career, publications, photography projects, behind-the-scenes of my work, and our "unconventional" lifestyle.
It could be a mixture of all these things because that is what our daily life is made of.
Where my knowledge comes from
Venice for artists, has always been a place of encounters, exchanges, studies, rivalries, commissioning, and exhibition. In their studios it was possible to find knowledge of practices and materials handed down by other artists, often considered Masters. Only with experience, repeated attempts, copies, and mistakes, this knowledge, sometimes only handed down orally or sometimes found in old notebooks, could be reused, revisited, or reworked.
This is true both for painting, which until the early 1900s was based on custom recipes (ready-made materials did not yet exist on the market as we take for granted today!), and for culinary wisdom, i.e., home recipes, valuable knowledge whose roots lie in the tradition and experience of the hands of those who came before us.
Specifically, in terms of knowledge related to the fine arts world, I am the daughter of artists and teachers at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, whose masters descended directly from the greatest nineteenth-century Venetian painters. Keepers of now-forgotten wisdom, I grew up in their ateliers, among vials and ampoules, earth pigments and mediums, and natural preparations for painting, engraving, or drawing.
Instead, on the culinary side, many of the recipes I share come from my Venetian family tradition with Jewish, Istrian, and Austrian influences. I am passionate about Italian regional cuisine, especially ancient and popular recipes, those dearest to our grandparents. The Venetian cuisine - which is my main source of inspiration - is essentially a cuisine made up of influences, brought by the trade relations Venice had throughout its prosperous history with the peoples of the East. So, to me, the kitchen is just that, a living place, a creative atelier, to which I bring ancestral traditions but also new inspirations.
Everything else, such as photography-related topics are my insights gained over the years through study, direct experience, and practice as a professional in this field. If you want to know more, here is my biography.
Why subscribe?
In a scenario where social media completely changes rules at lightning speed, and blogs seem to be dead, it is increasingly difficult to stand out of the crowd, build, and maintain an attentive, sincerely interested, and loyal audience.
Making art, and creating quality content takes a lot of time and dedication, and for some of us, it is a necessity. It is not a hobby, but the way we sustain ourselves. If you subscribe you support my work and contribute to the realization of a dream: you allow me to live my life doing what I love most, which is to share with others my essence, my love for my roots and cultural heritage made up of multiple and unique experiences.
At this stage I am not promising a definite cadence of article releases, I will only share when I have something really interesting and valuable to share.
This newsletter will be free until I build up enough to show you what it is all about, then it will become partially fee-based and by subscribing you will have access to exclusive content. So, thank you for considering upgrading to a paid subscription now or in the future.
Get in touch!
You can find me on IG at @thefreakytable and via email at thefreakytable@zairazarotti.com.
