Art
Australian Indigenous bush medicineThe 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. |
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Giuseppe ArcimboldoGiuseppe 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. |
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Caroline BarnesCaroline Barnes makes ‘copies’ of famolus paintings using vegetables and toast. The image right is a ‘copy’ of Picasso’s Woman with hat. Like other creations by Caroline, it was created during one of the pandemic lockdowns. As she says, “At the beginning of lockdown and with my monthly visits to the National Gallery on hold, I thought I’d try to transfer the art I was missing to toast.” Also, “Of all the toast art I’ve made, my favourite to eat was Picasso’s Woman with hat as it’s the closest to what I’d normally eat for lunch.“ |
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Jill BlissJill Bliss creates photos of medleys of fungi, flowers, ferns, and other botanical elements. |
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Pieter Bruegel the ElderPieter Bruegel the Elder is one of the most famous painters from the 16th Century. In contrast to his Reniassance counterparts, Bruegel often painted non-religious, everyday scenes. This one, dated 1566-69, is called The peasant wedding. |
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Mirranda BurtonLocal artist Mirranda Burton has created graphics for each of the 12 principles of permaculture. |
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CaravaggioPerhaps 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“! |
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ChangKi ChungKorean ChangKi Chung composes, and then photographs, stacks of food. |
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Salvador DaliSalvador 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. |
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Joan DenisonDuring the Covid-19 pandemic, Joan Denison’s ‘ISO chooks’ have been sweeping across Eltham and surrounding suburbs and now number around 3,000. |
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Tessa DonigaSpanish 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. |
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Felicity GordonFelicity Gordon’s compost house is made up of 61 plants, 50 of them edible. |
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Alonsa GuevaraAlonsa Guevara paints hyperrealistic paintings of fruit, such as the orange pictured right. |
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Loes HeerinkLoes Heerink takes aerial photos of street vendors in Vietnam. |
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Adam HillmanAdam Hillman slices and dices fruit and other food to create artistic photos. |
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Mikkel Jul HvilshøjMikkel Jul Hvilshøj creates photos of the components of recipes. |
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William KassWilliam Kass creates, and then photographs, miniature scenes using food. |
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William KiddCeramicist William Kidd creates ceramic bowls, vessels, plates, jars and sculptures with the shapes of exotic fantasy fruits and plants. |
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Takehiro Kishimoto (aka Gaku)From the Colossal website, have a look at their recent article on carved food plus their subsequent article. |
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Konekono KitsuneKonekono Kitsune embroiders vegetables. As she has apparently said, “Embroidery threads are great for expressing vegetable fibres.“ |
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Lauren KoLauren Ko makes pies with geometric patterns. |
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Lernert & Sander98 different unprocessed foods each cut into 1 inch cubes. |
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Lito Leaf ArtLito Leaf Art is a Japanese artist who carves scenarios on tree leaves. |
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Amanda NolaGourds turned into art. |
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Dieter RothThe 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. |
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Tatiana ShkondinaTatiana 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. |
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Tjalf SparnaayTjalf Sparnaay is a dutch artist who specialises in hyperrealistic paintings of food. |
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Sabine TimmSabine Timm makes cartoonish bread faces and other wheaty characters out of sandwich bread. |
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Floris van DyckDutch breakfast with cheese, bread, nuts and fruit, served on a fine white linen napkin protecting the red tablecloth. Painted in 1610. |
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Vincent van GoghThe only(?) prominent painter ever to have painted potatoes. |
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Diego VelazquezOld woman frying eggs is a painting by Spanish painter Diego Velazquez and was painted around 1618 (when Velazquez was in his late teens). Unusually for its time, it is a ‘genre painting’, which means that it depicts ordinary life by portraying ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities (rather than gods etc with no clothes on!). It is also notable for its ‘chiaroscuro’ (cf. shading), with different parts of the painting ranging from bright light to almost total darkness. And, finally, it is a precursor to ‘photorealism’, which is where the painting looks as realistic as if it were a photograph. To summarise, it is a photorealistic, chiaroscuro, genre painting of a woman frying some eggs painted by a teenager around 600 years ago. P.s. Some people think that the woman is poaching eggs rather than frying them. |
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Leslie VigilLeslie Vigil uses buttercream to make cakes that look like collections of plants or flowers. |
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Uli WestphalUli 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! |
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