When artists turn their brains, eyes and palettes toward food, interesting things happen. What they serve up is usually not standard fare, but it can be intriguing, a different way to look at eating.
I say this as Artscape, the city's annual sweltering carnival of music, street food, crafts and art, is about to begin. I can't avoid Artscape. I live a few blocks away, close enough to run over and grab a sandwich, or roasted vegetables on a stick. In search of supper, I usually happen upon some culture, perhaps catching a glimpse of pieces of sculpture set up in the median of Mount Royal Avenue.
This year, I spoke with a handful of artists on the fringes of Artscape. They have set up exhibits at three locations within walking distance of the festival. Each exhibit has a food theme, hoping, no doubt, to attract the art-hungry masses.
At Westnorth Studio at 106 W. North Ave., the combination art gallery and home of Roy Crosse and Anelda Peters, the couple have put together The Menu Show. This exhibit, which opens tomorrow, uses some of the 200 menus that Peters has garnered from around the world and links them with food-related paintings, photographs, sculpture and videos from other artists.
Peters said she collected menus for a variety of reasons. There is a practical benefit, she said, of "being able to do your homework"; that is, studying a local restaurant's menu before you walk in the door. This advance work, she said, makes ordering much easier.
There is the aesthetic appeal, she said, noting that restaurants use different materials to convey their message. She showed me a menu of a Japanese restaurant that used photographs to display its offerings. Other menus, she said, rely on descriptive language. One of her favorite menus, from a restaurant in Costa Rica, is printed on a brown paper bag.
Menus also pack emotive power, she said. "When I look at a menu, I remember the whole experience, the meal I had and the friends that were with us."
A few doors down North Avenue, artists are playing with their food. The Load of Fun Gallerie at 120 W. North Ave. is holding a faux-cake-baking contest tomorrow night. Here, some 60 artists will display their idea of what a cake should look like, or will eat cake as they recite poetry. The rules of this contest are pretty loose, Sherwin Mark, proprietor of the gallery, told me. The only operative guideline is that at least one part of any creation must be edible, he said.
Mark said the idea of creating fake cakes came from watching Baltimore pastry chef Duff Goldman's Ace of Cakes television show on the Food Network. Goldman is slated to preside over the contest. The contest "is all part of making art a little less cold, a lot more fun," Mark told me.
Foodscape, a collection of food artwork that hangs on the wall of the Mount Royal Tavern at 1204 W. Mount Royal Ave., is somewhat like a former hippie who is now wearing a suit. Originally conceived as protest, the show is now 23 years old and is hovering dangerously close to respectability. The work of many of its founders has subsequently appeared in sanctioned Artscape venues. Moreover, checking out artwork in the air-conditioned comfort of a tavern has become an insider attraction of Artscape, not a hardship.
But popularity has not bred conformity, according to J. Kelly Lane, a Foodscape founder. "The food component of a piece of artwork can be a bit enigmatic, say painting with a basting brush," she said. Her contribution to this year's show, for instance, is a painting called Tea With Balthus, which she described as "pretending to have tea" with the noted French painter.
When photographer Jim Burger described how the show was put together, it reminded me of a chef who doesn't know what he is cooking until he surveys what is in the fridge. "We never quite know what we are getting," Burger told me. "We hang the show at noon, we open it five hours later."
Ron Russell, whose Foodscape work traditionally combines food and baseball themes, such as a painting of a baseball player titled Onion Picker - old-time sports jargon for a sticky-gloved fielder - did a good job summing up the artistic perspective on food.
"As an art student, some of the first things you render are an apple, an orange, a pear," he told me. Later, he said, as a painter, "some days you paint yourself, some days you paint your wife, and some days you paint your food."
rob.kasper@baltsun.com