Food is Emotional - An Artist's Outlook
When I talk about the spark for my recent photography project I always lean toward the dark, moody, and classic aesthetics. What I learned almost immediately when I began to research the life of Juan Sánchez Cotán was that I became borderline obsessed with the object and materials that Cotán chose to include in his paintings.
Food.
Fruits, Vegetables, Animals, and Spanish Pantries.
My relationship with food has changed so much over the past 15 years. Food is weird for most people, right? We love it, we hate it, we have too much or not enough. Food equals power for and power over people. Over the past year, we’ve been flooded with images of food insecurities and long car lines.
Food is emotional. I can think of dieting when I didn’t need it, attempting to eat healthier in anticipation of pregnancy, discovering that gluten was essentially killing me, and going plant-based over eight years ago. AND that’s just me. My daughter was born with the inability to tolerate any foods and has an exhaustive list of allergies that actually land her in the hospital. It’s complicated.
Our day-to-day relationship with what goes in our body seems like the battle between the cans and can nots. I know I’m not alone in this. So when thinking about Cotán’s paintings I found a deeper personal connection tied together hundreds of years apart with something as universal as a lemon.
See the entire series here
