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The amazing Garlic

Garlic is a member of the lily family.
Garlic contains an amino acid, allicin which scientists say has antibiotic, antiviral and antibacterial effects.

Garlic is being used and praised for over 5,000 years.

Garlic is a powerful natural medicine in addition to being a strong-flavored seasoning for food.

Garlic has abilities to lower cholesterol and reduce the clotting tendency of the blood. It can also help lower high blood pressure.

Garlic does wonders for yeast infections and the common cold. Try eating few raw cloves as soon as the symptoms appear. Believe me... It works!
Incidentally a clove of garlic is one of the segments that make up a head or bulb.

Garlic loses some of its antibiotic properties when it's cooked or dried out. If eating raw garlic does not appeal to you.. then make it more palatable by chopping it very fine, mixing it with food, or cut a clove into small chunks and swallow them whole like pill..

By the way chewing some fresh parsley also helps eliminate the odor!.

Here is a healthy, easy and fresh tasting party snack!

6 - 8 ripe Roma tomatoes - chopped
4 tbls. olive oil
2 tbls. fresh basil - chopped
4 cloves Garlic - finely chopped
1/2 cup Romano cheese - shredded
Salt and pepper to taste
1 French bread baguette - sliced into 1/4" slices

Toast bread slices on both sides in broiler until golden. Set aside. Combine tomatoes, oil, basil, garlic and cheese. Spread a spoonful of mixture on each bread slice and serve.

In 1858, under the direction of his father, a successful banker determined to have his son enter the same profession, Cezanne entered the law school of the University of Aix-en-Provence. He had no taste for the law, however, having decided at an early age to pursue some kind of artistic career, after two years he persuaded his father, with the support of his mother, to allow him to study painting in Paris.

Cezanne's first stay in Paris lasted only five months. The instability of his personality gave way to severe depression almost immediately when he found that he was not as proficient technically as some of the students at the Academie Suisse, the studio where he began his instruction. He stayed as long as he did only because of the encouragement of his friend Emile Zola. Returning to Aix, Cezanne made a new attempt to content himself with working at his father's bank, but after a year he returned to Paris with strengthened resolution to stay. During his formative years, from about 1858 to 1872, Cezanne alternated between living in Paris and visiting Aix.

The early 1860s was a period of great vitality for Parisian literary and artistic activity. The conflict had reached its height between the Realist painters, led by Gustave Courbet, and the official Academie des Beaux-Arts which rejected from its annual exhibition - and thus from public acceptance - all paintings not in the academic Neoclassical or Romantic styles. Cezanne, whose tastes had soon shifted away from the academic, became associated with the most advanced members of the Realist group, including Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas. Most of these artistis were only in their 20s, as was Cezanne, and were just forming their styles; they were to become, with the exception of Manet, the Impressionist school. Cezanne's friend Zola was passionately devoted to their cause. Cezanne was greatly impressed by the Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix whose compositions emphasized color instead of line. During this period Cezanne began to develop a style that was violent and dark. He painted scenes with harsh extremes of light and shadow and with a looseness and vigor that are remarkable for the time but that can be traced to the influence of Delacrox's swirling compositions.

In July 1870, with the outbreak of the Franco-German war, Cezanne left Paris for Provence, partly to avoid being drafted. He took with him Marie-Hortense Fiquet, a young woman who had become his mistress the previous year and whom he married in 1886. The Cezannes settled at Estaque, a small village on the coast of southern France, not far from Marseille. There he began to paint landscapes. He began to approach his subjects the way his Impressionist friends did. In 1872 Marie-Hortense gave birth to a son. Soon afterward, at the invitation of Camille Pissaro, Cezanne took his family to live at Pontoise , in the valley of the Oise River. There he began seriously to learn the techniques and theories of Impressionism from Pissaro, who of his painter friends was the only one patient enough to teach him despite his difficult personality. Pissaro persuaded Cezanne to lighten his colors and showed him the advantages of using the broken bit of color and short brushstrokes which were the trademark of the Impressionists and which Cezanne came to use regularly, although with a different effect, in his later work.

Cezanne died on October 22, 1906. His art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the convetional values of painting in the 19th century because of his insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself, regardless of the subject matter.

James C. Stathis
Associate Editor