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My practice focuses on food through my photography of fruit, confections, and soup cans, in particular exploring ‘How have artists changed the way they portray food in their work over the past 60 years?’. My research showed the way food is portrayed in art has really developed since 1960 and I wanted to explore the different meanings.
To develop this work, I focused on the three periods, the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, and the 2000s to the present day. The three periods were formed based on research that showed how the symbolism of food decreased through each period but shifted in style. I created my own work in the style of artists of the periods to illustrate these changes over the 60-year period. I am inspired by how the food around me is displayed and advertised, and trips to museums and galleries.
My work ‘Fruit Bowl’, presented in the Autumn exhibition at Reading, 2022, was an acrylic, oil, and pen painting of my own fruit bowl on four flat 16x20inch canvases in line with Roy Lichtenstein’s 1973 ‘Still life with crystal bowl’, as I was interested in Litchenstein’s use of bold colours, thick brisk marks, and comic style images. Furthermore, I was intrigued how the different foods he painted often represented different meanings in the 1960s and 1970s, for example apples. Apples have always been portrayed sometimes signifying knowledge and wealth of the upper class, decay, sour flavours, or sin. Oranges also represented wealth while bananas represented global trade and availability to everyone during the Pop Art period, and grapes portrayed sweet flavours. Following this research, I incorporated similar fruit in my work, and similar colours (contrast of black and white), shapes (bowl/cone) and media (acrylic and oil) seen in Andy Warhol’s 1962 famous ‘Campbell’s Soup’ can and Wayne Thiebaud’s 1962 ‘Confections’.
In a second stage of this project, I researched how food was portrayed in the 1980s and 1990s, compared with the 1960s and 1970s. Research showed that Audrey Flack used apples and oranges to link to feminism, whereas Gerhard Richter did not have a particular reason for the incorporation of food, showing less symbolism than before. Following on from this my work ‘Fruit, Tulips and Paint’, presented in the second Autumn exhibition at Reading, 2022, was an acrylic, watercolour and pen painting of my own composition incorporating both fruit and everyday objects. Although I was interested in how Richter makes small scale artwork, I did a large canvas (33x40inch) in the style of Flack, which incorporated Flack’s realistic style, bright bold colours and compositional collages, with Richter’s paler colour palette overlaid with graphite to create a darker aspect to my work, enhancing the abstract nature of reality.
My work ‘Pineapple Assortment’, presented in the Spring exhibition at Reading, 2022, explored how food is portrayed in the 2000s onwards often in non-natural colours. I did a 32x40inch canvas painting incorporating a variety of foods. Although I was intrigued by how Sarah Graham makes her sweets very realistic, I created a more contemporary look, linking to the work of Lori Larusso. I used Photoshop to explore abstract colours that food wouldn’t normally be, linking to the work of James Paterson. I also used photography of my own animals that I created out of fruit as I was interested in how Anna Keville Joyce and Dan Cretu both use actual fruit to create their work. However, food symbolism is less relevant in these artists’ work, although Kara Walker and Joel Penkman used food to represent familiarity, slavery, and memories.
In the last stage of this project, my work ‘Still Life Across 60 Years’ presented in the Summer exhibition at Reading, 2022, was an acrylic, oil, pencil, and watercolour painting which pulled together my research on the 60-year period. I incorporated Lichtenstein’s stripes and glass bowl from the 1960s and 1970s, Flack’s and Richter’s flowers, paints, apples, and black shaded grapes from the 1980s and 1990s, and Graham’s sweets and Paterson’s oranges and grapes in non-natural colours from the 2000s onwards.
In conclusion, the way food has been portrayed has changed dramatically throughout the 60 years, but food symbolism has become significantly less important over the same time.