Painting is often associated with the use of acrylic, oil and watercolor. But these days, this visual art form has added a new material – coffee.
Coffee painting is popular nowadays and many are happy with the result plus the aroma of their art work. In fact, there are now artists who specialize in using coffee for painting.
Painters Using Coffee
Pornchai Lerthammasiri is a Thai artist well known for his watercolor paintings. Some 15 years ago, however, he felt the need for more challenge in his work the reason why he ventured into using coffee for a change. For this reason, he is now known as the Impressionist of coffee art.
Hong Yi, a young Malaysian artist, uses the bottom of an espresso cup in her painting. More known as Red in the art world, Yi became famous for her coffee painting when she made a portrait of Malaysian businessman Francis Yeoh.
Karen Eland is an American painter well known for her remakes of famous masterpieces from the history of art including Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa using coffee. Her passion for painting began at the young age of 14.
Couple Andrew Saur and Angel Sarkela-Saur uses the name The Coffee and they have been painting using coffee for 10 years now for purposes of advertising. Their art works often feature every day tools and objects that relate to food and what else, coffee.
American Steven Mikel is known as the scientist of coffee art. This artist and computer technician spent years researching on ways to protect his coffee paintings using an UV resistant layer. His technique allowed paintings to be hung even without a glass cover.
History of Coffee Painting
Did you know that the art of painting with coffee dates back to centuries ago? That was during the time when coffee started to be widely used in Europe.
Earlier, it was tea that was used in painting. The Chinese were noted to use tea to color their paper and create a sepia look to the background of their paintings.
Also in the olden days, coffee and tea were used to make marble statues appear older. Gabriele d’Annunzio, an Italian poet, was known to make his statues in his garden look ancient and he used coffee and tea to achieve that appearance.
So who says coffee is only good for drinking? It’s now good for painting too and while the drink is recommended for adults only, coffee painting can very well be done by both the young and old folks.
Originally posted on April 7, 2015 @ 1:14 pm