Edible Art

First of all as someone who has spent 2.5 years working at DQ I must expound upon DQ ice cream cakes. At DQ Glen Ellyn we have about 120 ice cream cakes on hand. We do custom order cakes. This is where a lot of the complex cakes designs come from. The cakes are totally made of ice cream (no flour/cake involved). The middle is usually a fudge "cake crunch" (a crunchy chocolate covered in fudge) or a pie crust center. The sold center help the cake hold its shape. People come in with all kinds of ideas of what they want their cake to look like. In our store there is a photo album of some of the designs our cake decorator, Terry, has made. Some of the designs include drawings of babies and alphabet blocks for baby showers, dinosaurs, trucks, and every kind of sport. A cake that was ordered recently was made to be shaped like a cat and had some plastic decorations for the tail and collar. One of the most popular ways to decorate a cake is with a "deco" set, a set of plastic items that give the cake a theme. I have decorated a few cakes for last minute orders. One of the cakes was a bowling lane drawn with colored agar gel, then at the end of the lane was a set of mini bowling pins and a bowling ball. They were set to look as if the ball was just hitting the pins and the pins were shooting in every direction. On another cake the gel was used to make the cake to look like a baseball and had mini baseballs around the perimeter. Some people even bring their own items that they want incorporated into the cake. Besides the gels special edible spray color, butter creme icing, and edible images (photos) are used for decoration. You can eat "Hannah Montana's" face, or Uncle Bob's face. The tricky part to ice cream decoration is there is a time limit before the cake needs to be refrozen. Also some of the deco items insert better into soft ice cream while gels need to be on a totally frozen solid surface.





I also looked at a website that displayed various kinds of edible art. Some of the art included Japanese packaged meals shaped to become common objects, people placed in a food"scape", and vegetable sculptures. All of these artists put their own creative twist on "edible art."

http://weburbanist.com/2009/01/08/food-art-and-food-artists/

DUPAL Gallery

This week I went to the Gallery at the Dupage Art League. The month theme was "artist's choice" so there weren't any of intentional connections between the pieces that I was expecting to find. There were some great pieces though. One of my favourites was a piece entitled, "Watercolor Knowledge." The painting was (obviously) a watercolor. It displayed very good technique with many textures, expert washes/layer building, and composition. The most amusing part of the painting is the subject is an art studio library. Shelves filled with books of painting knowledge is translated into visual prowess through the painting. The use of light is particularly well done. Its highlights seem like blinding glare naturally found on plastic book covers, while the shadows provide a wide value scale.

The other piece that stuck out to me was called "Senior Hopscotch." It was a watercolor showing a scene in which senior citizens were doing hopscotch. One of my friend's "concentration" section of her AP Portfolio explored a similar idea. She created images through graphic design that showed older people (middle age and up) rediscovering their childhoods. There were images from older people jumping rope to sword fighting. All of the images had bold contours around the people/objects giving it a coloring book feel. Also the edges of the images faded out in a cloud-like manor showing the dream state of the elderly.

Favourite Artist- today Renoir

Call me indecisive, but I find it an impossible task to pick one favourite artist. However I do find myself continually drawn to some of the same artists, styles, and concepts. One of these artists is Renoir. I love the impressionist style, and the idea of creating something beautiful out of what would seem from up close as chaotic, messy blobs of color. Renoir's paintings are beautifully rendered, and the characters and scenes found in his paintings always seem to have some story behind the faces. They seem to hold secrets, their emotions come through their eyes, as if they are calling out to you, but cannot be heard.

As much as I am drawn to traditional paintings, I am very interested in how people in the past/present continually push the definitions of art. In Jr. High my art teacher (Joe Eddy Brown*) taught us, what he called, "street art". This literally meant finding something on the street (e.g. pop cans, litter, hubcaps) or on the side of the street (old electronics, things to be discarded that had some other creative potential) and incorporating those objects into three-dimensional artwork. One time we wrote a haiku and visually "made" the poem.

For a while I put this art in a different category in my developing definition of art. I wanted to learn "real" art, aka traditional drawing and painting techniques. Lately in my art journey I have incorporated some of his "non-traditional materials" art into a series of well, let's call them paintings. Some of those art pieces used lipstick as paint, grass, tissue paper, dried roses, resin, coffee, and inkjet transfer. I think the variety of art influences has made me a "multi-personality painter." For now I'm okay with that. I am open to learning many techniques and styles, and I look forward to learning about artists that will challenge and inspire my art journey (and the journeys of my future students.)

*Page 4 has a short article about a class he taught at DUPAL http://www.dupageartleague.org/DPALdata/DPAL/Newsletters/2009/11.pdf



http://www.paintingmania.com/Arts/Big/3149_big.jpg