peanut butter, 8×8in, acrylic on panel

when the flinn gallery approached me for the food…glorious food show, they basically (in so many words) said "we've got plenty of fruits & veggies, we want the other stuff."

the tricky part about the other stuff – packaged goods like these pb&j jars – is that they're immediately recognizable. there's room for a bit of 'artistic' leeway in the funky organic forms of peppers and the like – but here, if any of the familiar colors or shapes are off, the finished works look odd.


jelly jar, 8×8in, acrylic on panel

still – for me the food paintings are, above all, about creating a believable space, not about photographic reproduction.

so, when i approach this type of subject, it's not about getting the labels exact – it's about getting them close enough that, in the words of my former professor Barry Moser, "they don't interrupt the viewer's fictional dream."

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