"painting" news and stories

We all know that the best way to create healthy habits is to teach them to kids while they're young. Amanda Rose of the Ethicurean has taken that wisdom to heart. She's been reading Michael Pollen's Omnivore's Dilemma and as she has worked her way through each chapter, she has told her 5-year-old son Frederick about the book. He, in turn, has taken the ideas Amanda shared with him and made paintings for each chapter. And they are awesome! There is nothing like a complex idea distilled by an innocent brain and rendered in tempera paint. Or is that water colors?

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While I'm not a parent myself, I've spent quite a lot of time in my life providing child care, and so I know that entertaining kids can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. One surefire way to keep the younger set happy is to give them either an art project or a cooking project. When you can combine the two and give them an artistic project that then turns into something they can eat, all the better!

Marie at Make and Takes did a really fun activity with her kids recently, in which she added food coloring to bowls of milk and used them as edible paint that they then used to color bread. The bread got toasted and eaten. They ate their painted toast dry, but you could butter it or give it a glaze with a bit of honey.

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Candy Addict recently did a review of several graphic artists that paint and sculpt with chewing gum. I think my favorite of the three they list is a series called Gum Blondes by artist Jason Kronenwald. His Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe are great. Candy Addict also mentions GumArt, a collection three-dimensional works from veteran gum artist Jamie Marraccini. These sort of recall the stop-motion animation of early Peter Gabriel videos. Finally, there's Ben Harben, whose Bubblegum Society art (above) imitates the bubblegum life of reality television with portraits of stars from shows like American Idol and Survivor. Candy Addict also has info on "Chew by Numbers" kits.

I recently became acquainted with the paintings of Will Cotton. I'll be up-front here and tell you that I don't really have the visual art background to say anything too insightful about Cotton's work. I could probably venture as far as saying that it reminds me of a combination of Maxfield Parrish and Willie Wonka. Cotton paints sticky-sweet landscapes of candy and chocolate, often inhabited by alluring female figures in various states of repose. A recent New York Times article followed Cotton to Paris as he sought inspiration from a famous macaroon maker. "I'm interested in depicting an imagined utopia, a place that's only about pleasure," Cotton told the Times. Props to anyone to can work Zebra Cakes into that vision.