Series: Antionette
There are similarities between cooking and painting, both of which I use to explore the way food influences community. Painting seems as much about creating sensations to please the senses, as does cooking. It is a material process that transforms the ‘raw to the cooked’ for the consumption of a viewer. Each in turn have a ‘picture’ to create, a fact to influence, and an idea to contribute. Both utilize the seduction of ‘hunger’, bringing a delicious quality that inspires desire, and is consumed or digested by being physically incorporated into a processing audience. It is no surprise that both cooking and painting are both culturally loaded symbols that we use in a variety of ways in relating to others.
Painting food subjects is about creating sensations to please the senses. I ice my canvasses simulating my baking experiences. I approach my paint as if it was food, mimicking sensually irresistible and consumable qualities. I push saccharin sweetness, aiming over a gluttonous edge to incorporate scenes from the over-indulgence Baroque period of wine, food, sex, and dress. As Roland Barthes states in ‘Ornamental Cookery’, I was ‘fleeing from nature [or the natural] thanks to a kind of frenzied baroque (sticking shrimps in a lemon, making a chicken look pink, serving grapefruit hot)’. Incorporated are representations of raw meat decaying in the heat from local Halal shops whose weight seems to balance the syrup. Transitions move from food and its influence on people groups using images of personal community to exploring food’s influence over the viewer, both painted and real.
