Pastry As Art

A Parisian patisserie display. And yes, they taste as good as they look. But I wonder how they keep tourists from drooling all over their nice clean window...

You may know me as an artist and a nature lover, but I am also crazy about desserts. I love to bake them, I love to eat them, I love to drool over them in pastry shops all over the world. I consider food in general and desserts specifically as art.

There is a point however where my love of eating dessert could lead to some unhealthy excesses, so I decided to feed my eyes rather than my stomach and give painting desserts a try. I figured at the very least it would be a fun diversion from that curlew painting I've been wrestling with. My studio smelled of sugar for days afterwards.

My first ever cake painting. 8" x 8" acrylic on gessoboard. What do you think?

At the Blue Bottle Cafe in the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, they take dessert as art to a whole different level. Check this out. The desserts are modeled after some of the art pieces in the museum, including Mondrian and Wayne Thiebaud. I guess that's being able to paint your cake and eat it, too.

Painting 34 - Monsieur Puglsey

I know I haven't posted any paintings lately. But I am still managing to squeeze in some painting time in between life. I am also taking Laure Ferlita's Imaginary Trip to Paris this Fall to try to improve my non-nature watercolor sketching. This little guy is the first natural history subject I've done in the class, so thought I'd share it here. We're each working in a hand-made watercolor journal for the "trip", so with keeping a travel journal in mind, I've left room on the left of the page to write my entry.

This was a tricky piece for me to do. We had a cute photo of this dog to work from, but I wanted to add some details that set the scene - in my mind the dog was standing under a its owner's chair at a Parisian cafe, patiently waiting for a treat, but to do that I had to work from my imagination and try to guess how the light would fall on the chair legs and how the dog would realistically look standing under a chair that wasn't really there. I also wanted this to be a loose watercolor sketch, with pencil lines showing and all, but I got so caught up in the details around his eye!

Meanwhile, I'm hunkered down, craving hot soup and other cold-weather comfort foods, waiting for this cold snap to break. The snow is pretty though.