Food as muse

From realistic portraits, to comic strips on recipes and food street art, here’s how cuisine has become a new-found indulgence into rediscovering food art symbolism, writes Madhulika Dash

Circa 1590: Renaissance court portraitist Giuseppe Arcimboldo was commissioned to do a portrait of his royal patron, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Known for his inimitable sense of humour, he painted the king as a heap of fruits and vegetables with pea pod as eyelids and a gourd for the forehead. The result was more of a crudité platter than a king.

Luckily for Arcimboldo, the emperor was habitual of his zest and found the new style endearing. Such was the love for the new style of food art that the portraitist in the next two decades made several such paintings adding his collection to an art form that began in ancient Rome and continued much into the 20th century. Over the years what changed, says artist and a habitual food doodler, Veejayant Dash, “was the theme: from being a part of a surreal painting, food paintings took on a more symbolic theme that showcased the social bend of the time.” An excellent example of this was American painter Wayne Thiebaud Around the Cake and Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey, where both the artists use food and a restaurant to bring forth the little excitement of all things ‘mundane’, adds Dash.

Sarasvathy T K’s ‘Dosa and Sambar’
oil on linen

Art patrons

Interestingly it was this pop art that found more patrons in India in the early years as advertisement heavily relied on an artist’s keen sense of using food to convey emotion. By the turn of the 80s with the visual medium, this form of art took a backseat with fewer artists who did it more as a hobby. The year 2011 proved to be a turning point when, as part of the revivalist movement, the artworks of Renaissance artists were re-exhibited — and one such portrait specialist to see the light once again was Arcimboldo. His work nudged many to take up sketching food, and more to find their own niche in it. Recalls T K Sarasvathy, who took to drawing food in oil five years ago both, as part of rediscovering her legacy, and for giving Indian cuisine a representation in the realistic art space. Food, says the New Jersey-based artist, “has been a recurring theme in the art world for a long time. Artists across have used its appeal for the desired effect. But when it comes to the realistic space, there was absolutely nothing on Indian food. And that’s when I decided to work on Indian food beginning with my own Southern Odyssey.”

Since then, she has not only done exhibitions of her food paintings in museums across New York and the US, including a release of a customised postage stamp of her iconic ‘idli, sambar and coconut chutney’ painting coinciding with Idli Day on March 30 but now plans to do a series on the iconic dishes from India as part of her legacy series.

Fascinatingly, Sarasvathy isn’t the only one fascinated with drawing her own legacy cuisine, content manager Seema Misra too finds solace in doodling on her favourite food, especially Odia cuisine. Says Seema, “I love sketching locations. In fact, illustrating travelogues often dominates my artworks thanks to my association with a group called Urban Sketchers. However, lately, food has become a larger part not only of my days at home but the central theme of my work as well.”

Different strokes

A plein air sketch artist while most of her works are line drawings that work on accentuating the little details of food, it is, confesses Seema, “a challenge to sit and draw the food with the craving building up faster than Rome.” Seema has finally been able to give a theme to her many illustrations which may eventually turn up as one of the delicious segments of her travelogue book. For peer artist Swayamprakash Mohanty, the whole fascination with food sketching has more to do with recreating memories. A landscape artist, Mohanty’s impetus to draw food stories came from the website “They Draw & Cook”. “It was while following a recipe through their illustration that I realised the brilliance of food as a subject — and the many challenges it has for an artist. For instance, how do you create the glistening of the oil, that inimitable quality of feast to the eyes, and of course the idea of capturing aroma with a few strokes,” recalls the illustrator whose tryst with food symbolism began with an iconic dish called pakhala.

Seema Misra

“It was one of the most challenging, yet the most satiating piece of work that I did. I had to find references for the dish to come alive and actually had to look at many combinations that we have in Odisha for the dish to lend that sense of taste to my work,” says the illustrator, who eventually discovered the charm of doing art that tell short stories replete with characters, much like Malgudi Days.” Mohanty plans to turn his work into collectable postcard series and is now working on capturing the city through such food stories.

Susrita Samantaray, a micro artist, finds the whole exercise of food drawing as a brilliant mind-opener. Says the seasoned designer, “you learn to think out of the box and start finding exciting facets of something that may have not so long ago appeared ordinary. A good example of this was when I did my first micro art for enduri pitha. Just getting the picture of the batter being poured on leaf and the leaf getting folded needed rethinking to make the drawing speak.”

Susrita, who began drawing temples and historical places because of the detailing each has on them, finds creating recipe format artwork on food a more ‘engaging’ challenge and plans to put together an illustrated cookbook on cuisine to help people “admire and respect the simplicity and authenticity of traditional cuisine.” A fact that also nudged Aparna Vijayan to work on food illustration. Drawing food for me, says Aparna, “isn’t just about nostalgia or the challenge of realistic portrayal of food, it is about capturing a dish to connect and bring out different emotions in a person, including me as an artist.”

One of the many reasons, adds the Chennai-based artist, “why I choose to use the Indian comic format to create my pieces, which are made from memory rather than with a live dish in front of you.” Interestingly unlike her peers who have taken to drawing dishes, Vijayan loves the independence of being “unthematic” as of now. “It gives me the freedom to choose my muse of the day randomly these days — and then weave a story into it.”