This week I'm writing to you from the beautiful setting of the 400-year-old Cloughjordan House in North Tipperary. I'm here for a Lens & Larder food photography and food styling retreat, run by Irish food writers and photographers Cliodhna Prendergast and Imen McDonnell. For the next two days, I'll be shooting alongside the teachers of this retreat, food and travel photographers Andrea Gentl and Martin Hyers, who've come from New York to teach a small group how to approach food photography and styling like a story. Their own works, particularly when it comes to their food photography, are compositions of pure still life, and looking at their work got me thinking about food styling and art.
Part of my varied work life at the moment is food styling, which is the process of making food look good for the camera, whether it’s for photography or film. It feels like a very new job, one spawned from the entrepreneurial nature of blogging but, if you think about it, food styling has been around for as long as people have cared about how food looks.
Food and art go way back. The archaeological relevance of food is one thing: images of bread, wine, dairy and poultry captured on Ancient Egyptians wall paintings has helped historians learn about the diet and way of life of that ancient civilization.
Similarly with ancient Rome, paintings such as the Roman wall painting of a plate of fruit and some vases, unearthed at Pompeii and thought to date to around 70AD, offers us visual proof of this civilization’s cultural advances. That particular painting is currently housed in the Naples National Archaeological Museum for visitors to see.
But food and art are way more fascinating when looked at through a lense of symbolism. In The Last Supper, which Leonardo da Vinci completed sometime between between 1495 and 1498,the food is sparse yet their hidden meanings have been analysed, probed and dissected by art historians for centuries. According to a mentalfloss.com article entitled 15 Things You Should Know About The Last Supper, there are theories that the spilled salt that sits before Judas could represent his betrayal, though some see it as a sign of his bad luck for being chosen as the one to betray Jesus.
Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus(1601), pictured above, continues with the heavily religious themes. This piece is said to capture the moment where the resurrected Jesus is about to reveal himself to his disciples. The figures sit before a table layed with a simple meal of bread and roasted poultry. There is a basket stuffed with plump fruits that hangs dangerously over the edge of the table, and it's sad that this bowl teeters on the edge in the same way that the disciples' reality hangs on the edge of their discovery that their messiah has come back to life.
Real-life representation In the 16th and 17th centuries, there was a move away from religious obsession in art and a growing interest in science and real-life representation. Still life was a fully fledged genre in its own right. The Flemish and Dutch painters of the Dutch Golden Age pretty much nailed this style. Jan Davidszoon de Heem's composition of his Still Life with Fruit and Ham (1648-49) is the antidote of this piece's simple title; it's all about extravagance and opulence, portraying a table piled high with juicy fruits, a shiny pink lobster and tummy-grumbling hunks of ham. Surely a food stylist was hired here to assist de Heem in his composition.
Willem Claeszoon Heda is another Dutch painter who captured food beautifully, particularly in his A Banquet-piece (c 1635), which you can see in Dublin's National Gallery, and no better night to go for a look than Culture Night on September 16th.
The piece presents pewter plates and a joint of ham, and I’m struck by how contemporary (perhaps timeless is a better word) the composition of the crumpled linen on the table and the hunks of broken bread are. It could be a photograph found on a Kinfolk lifestyle shoot.
You probably know Johannes Vermeer's iconic portrait of The Milkmaid (1658) but recently French graphic artist Arthur Coulet had a bit of fun with this piece, and many other famous works of art, in his Tumblr blog Gluten Free Museum. He's basically used photoshop to remove any traces of bread or gluten from art history, and the results are rather gas.
Beyond Vermeer and de Heem, Van Gogh and Cézanne took still life into impressionism and beyond, with works such as Basket of Potatoes (Van Gogh, 1885) and The Basket of Apples (Cézanne, 1895). Those lads loved their baskets.
Frida Kahlo offers us a particularly poignant slice of food in art. Her final painting was Viva la Vida in 1954, and features a cluster of watermelons, some whole and some sliced. Watermelons appear often in Mexican art as it's a symbol linked to the holiday Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Just eight days before she died, at age 47, she completed this painting by adding her name and the title VIVA LA VIDA - Coyoacán 1954 Mexico into the pulp of the one of the watermelon segments in the piece.
For a much more thorough and scholarly approach to food and art in the form of seek out Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance by British food writer Gillian Riley, published last year."The art of cookery speaks for itself in recipe books and household accounts, in menus and shopping lists, in the findings of archaeologists, in the architecture of kitchens and dining rooms, and descriptions of meals in literature," writes Riley in the introduction to her book. "But perhaps the most vivid and tantalising evidence about what we ate and how we ate it is to be found in the fine and applied arts."
