The Cheeseburger Guy?

I’ve been painting my food series since 2024.  I’m suppose to be a serious artist, so why make oil paintings of junk food?

 

The simple answer is that I’m having fun and just feel like painting cheeseburgers.  That’s a flippant way of saying that I became obsessed with the subject matter and need to explore it though oil painting.  As an exercise, I forced myself to take a break from painting figures and faces in 2024.  I was curious if I might find another subject matter if I forced myself to not just paint more faces.  I painted abstracts, sports images, cityscapes, animals, landscapes, and food.  Something clicked with that painting of a slice of pizza.  I needed more.

 

The gooeyness of the cheese and the drippiness of the sauce correlated with the gooeyness and drippiness of the paint.  The organic interaction between subject and medium is exciting to paint and creates and dynamic object in the end process. Art for me is about human expression. The faster my movements can translate to the images, the more the work retains the human hand of creation, communicates the energy this it was painted with, and still renders an images.

 

Still life paintings of fruit, meat, and other food has been a part of art history.  It’s a basic exercise to paint an apple. Traditionally, these still life paintings display technique and create beauty.  I’m approaching the food items from where I was painting previously – figures and faces. My cheeseburgers feel more like portraits than still life to me.  My slice of Lou Malniti’s deep dish hopefully captures that pizza’s character though oil paint. I want to do more than simply render an object.

 

I love to also go back to the Impressionist painter, Claude Monet.  He’s was the haystack guy.  Then he was the water lily guy.  I find great inspiration in his tireless obsession with common items that he elevated to great art.  A photograph of a pond with water lilies may be beautiful, but his expressive, sloppy canvases with globs of paint, capture an feeling of being at that pond. Monet’s work is a beautiful example of how translating a subject to the medium of oil paint elevates it in a mysterious, powerful way.  I don’t describe myself as an impressionist, but I am inspired by them.

 

I work from photos I take of the food I’m about to consume.  Yes, I’m a level worse than posting a pic on social media of a fancy meal…I make oil paintings of my meals.  It’s part of the process that the subject painted literally powers me to create that art.  My photos aren’t well-lite shots appropriate for advertising, but the real experience of an average consumer.