Long before Instagram, American artist Richard Baker was keeping an illustrated food diary, drawing everything he ate, every day.
“We eat in a linear fashion,” he says. “We wake up in the morning and we eat and eat and eat and snack into the night. But to draw [those things] sometimes it’s live and sometimes a little later from memory. Sometimes it’s the scraps on the plate. So it’s like this weird time snapshot against this nonlinear platform.”
When he first started creating his illustrated food diaries, he had two little kids. They’re now both in their 20s, and he’s happy to say while he’s no less obsessed, his drawings have improved. “There is something about trying to map out what you’ve eaten,” he says. “I don’t often think about what I put in my body, and by paying attention, it becomes really amusing. (‘What was that? Oh, five jelly beans’.)”
Food has always appeared in his work, in one form or another, from boxes of cereal in his oil paintings, to a series of fake plaster food sculptures (“as a matter of fact [film director and sultan of sleaze] John Waters actually has, on his wall, one of my plaster pieces of toast.”)
He leans on classics from his childhood (s’mores, America’s infamous powdered drink, Kool Aid) but he says it’s about great design, not nostalgia. “There’s a real classic period of that stuff that I’m drawn to. And also what I’m drawn to is cheap stuff. If I’m painting flowers, I’m generally painting the corner-shop tulip, not an orchid. I like things that are very common, kinda accessible and trashy.”
As to the mediums he works in, Baker is the ultimate contradiction –– an oil painting artist obsessed with watercolour. His oil paintings have a richness to them, giving you a sort of lunch-drunk feeling. Where the eye follows the slow, deliberate brush marks and lands on a brace of sole, a single anchovy, a dead fly, a cheap, wilting gerbera.
His gouache work, a water-based technique that builds layers of rich colour with no brush marks and very little drying time, allows him to reproduce the covers of some of America’s best loved cookbooks. You can almost smell the print, and the well-thumbed, dog-eared paper. The angle is just skew-whiff enough that you’re never quite sure if it’s the painting, or your astigmatism.
This is an excerpt from issue 2 of Swill. Grab a copy of Swill today to read the whole thing!