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. At the Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne from now until end September. Brownless Biomedical Library (Building 182), Kernot Road, Parkville, 3052. The library is behind the Medical Building on Grattan Street. Enter Gate 10, Grattan Street and follow Kernot Road.

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.

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“!

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.

Gaku

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

Felicity Gordon

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

Loes Heerink

Loes Heerink takes aerial photos of street vendors in Vietnam

William Kass

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

Lernert & Sander

98 different unprocessed foods each cut into 1 inch cubes.

Amanda Nola

Gourds turned into art.

Sabine Timm

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

Vincent van Gogh

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

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!