Art

Australian Indigenous bush medicine

The art of healing: Australian Indigenous bush medicine looks at traditional Indigenous healing practice through art and objects, giving examples of healing practice and bush medicine from many distinct and varied Indigenous communities across Australia. Sometimes at the Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter who, although he lived during the Renaissance, painted in a completely different style, focussed on portrait heads made entirely of fruits and vegetables. Many of his paintings are reversible, meaning that they look completely different upside down.

Jill Bliss

Jill Bliss creates photos of medleys of fungi, flowers, ferns, and other botanical elements.

Mirranda Burton

Local artist Mirranda Burton has created graphics for each of the 12 principles of permaculture.

Caravaggio

Perhaps the most famous painting ever of fruit: Boy with a Basket of Fruit, painted in 1594.

In passing, ten years later, according to Wikipedia, Caravaggio “murdered a love rival in a botched attempt at castration“!

ChangKi Chung

Korean ChangKi Chung composes, and then photographs, stacks of food.

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali’s cookbook has been re-printed: Les Diners de Gala is exactly the sort of thing one might imagine Dali producing. See the reviews at Colossal and Brain Pickings. Buy the book.

Joan Denison

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Joan Denison’s ‘ISO chooks’ have been sweeping across Eltham and surrounding suburbs and now number around 3,000.

Tessa Doniga

Spanish photographer Tessa Doniga became famous for her series of pictures ‘Break/Fast’, which are surreal images that take the word ‘breakfast’ literally and misappropriate everyday objects. See more of her photographs.

Felicity Gordon

Felicity Gordon’s compost house is made up of 61 plants, 50 of them edible.

Alonsa Guevara

Alonsa Guevara paints hyperrealistic paintings of fruit, such as the orange pictured right.

Loes Heerink

Loes Heerink takes aerial photos of street vendors in Vietnam.

Adam Hillman

Adam Hillman slices and dices fruit and other food to create artistic photos.

Mikkel Jul Hvilshøj

Mikkel Jul Hvilshøj creates photos of the components of recipes.

William Kass

William Kass creates, and then photographs, miniature scenes using food.

Takehiro Kishimoto (aka Gaku)

From the Colossal website, have a look at their recent article on carved food plus their subsequent article.

William Kidd

Ceramicist William Kidd creates ceramic bowls, vessels, plates, jars and sculptures with the shapes of exotic fantasy fruits and plants.

Lauren Ko

Lauren Ko makes pies with geometric patterns.

Lernert & Sander

98 different unprocessed foods each cut into 1 inch cubes.

Lito Leaf Art

Lito Leaf Art is a Japanese artist who carves scenarios on tree leaves.

Amanda Nola

Gourds turned into art.

Dieter Roth

The image right is part of a 1970 exhibition called Staple cheese (a race) by a Swiss/Icelandic artist called Dieter Roth. The exhibition comprised 37 suitcases filled with cheese, one of which was opened each day. Its title was a pun on the word steeplechase, the idea apparently being to see how far the cheeses slipped and slid (aka raced) as they rotted. Over time, the stench grew and permeated out of the building. The exhibition became overrun with maggots and flies but the artist declared that the insects were, in fact, his intended audience!

The four cheese used were brie, camembert, cheddar and limburger.

Tatiana Shkondina

Tatiana Shkondina recreates famous paintings using food and then photographs them. Feature artists include Dali, Hokusai, Klimt, Magritte, Malevich, Mondrian, Picasso, Rousseau and Warhol. The picture right is Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889) and was made with rice, blueberries and pasta. Look at some more of her creations.

Tjalf Sparnaay

Tjalf Sparnaay is a dutch artist who specialises in hyperrealistic paintings of food.

Sabine Timm

Sabine Timm makes cartoonish bread faces and other wheaty characters out of sandwich bread.

Floris van Dyck

Dutch breakfast with cheese, bread, nuts and fruit, served on a fine white linen napkin protecting the red tablecloth. Painted in 1610.

Vincent van Gogh

The only(?) prominent painter ever to have painted potatoes.

Leslie Vigil

Leslie Vigil uses buttercream to make cakes that look like collections of plants or flowers.

Uli Westphal

Uli Westphal has created a series of cultivar photos, each devoted to a particular veggie: beans, cabbages, capsicums, cucumbers, pears, potatoes, pumpkins, sweetcorn and tomatoes. Perhaps most extraordinarily, accompanying each photo, he gives a list of all the named varieties of that veggie; so, for example, for tomatoes, he lists around 19,000(!) varieties – if you don’t believe me, see the list!