Visions in cruciferous art
Where hunger + art = beauty+ form.
Lin is on a diet. Lin is starving. Lin is obsessing about sexy nekkid veggies again. Yeah, I know….you’re all frantically clicking the X button and vowing to come back in a few days time, but bear with me for a moment. (It gets hungrier, I promise.)
Whilst drooling over tonight’s dinner, it occurred to me that veggie porn is in fact an instrument for learning more about photography as well as about new and interesting ways to stuff your gob. Natural unprocessed food is a thing of beauty. Yeah I know you might experience your deepest artistic creative vision whilst gazing on the carbonated rectangle that comprises your instant ready-meal lasagne, but I’m talking about something much more profound that that. I’m talking about how gazing at your pert, firm, ripe, luscious veggies really teaches you to see.
Photography is often regarded as an instrument for teaching things, a way of discovering something new. A good photograph shows you something you hadn’t considered before, it reveals a new truth that you didn’t previously know.
Nature photographs illustrate my point perfectly. Consider a totally groovy photograph like the following piece by Weston (who else?) Doesn’t it just blow your mind? This might be lost on many of you, but personally this gives me a high nearly as good as the warm and fuzzy glowing feeling I get after boozing on one of bt’s mojito recipes.
At first I mistook it for an elegantly draped piece of cloth. I mean – wow! That looks like a fashion shot which could easily grace the pages of Vogue. Initially when you look at it, you don’t realise what the subject really is because the photograph is deliberately ambiguous, at least when seen from a distance. When you study it a bit more closely and you realise it’s a cabbage, it is that element of surprise is what makes you go, “Cool!”
This element of trickery, or teaching your viewer to see something new, is what draws us in to the photograph, and makes us linger over its beauty. It’s human nature to try and figure out what something means, and it is precisely this element of surprise which makes this photograph such compulsive viewing. Weston wasn’t like the rest of us, he could really see the hidden form in nature, and it was this ability to capture on camera the very different way he perceived the world, which made him a Master of Photography.
Of course Rich has a smidgen of a way to go before he reaches Weston’s standard, but he hasn’t let that deter him. Veggie art still has a lot to teach the amateur photographer. We all have to start somewhere after all. I mean, who hasn’t gone to their fridge in a moment of photographic desperation and picked out a pepper and tried to photograph it? C’mon…admit it, we’ve all done it. It’s part of the photographic learning process you know. Today a pepper, tomorrow a nude. Everything is a fine art photograph if you know how to look at it properly.
Actually I jealously guard my peppers (tonight’s ratatouille you know) but I’m slightly more footloose and fancy-free with my brassicas, so here’s a much less-talented and predictable example of veggie porn:
A Fluffy Cauli
It is of course a cauliflower (steam florets lightly for 20 mins and then mash - dee-lish!) Now is this not one of the most beautiful vegetables you’ve ever seen? Mother nature is both superlative artist and perfect mathematician. Maths, art and food are all expressions of beauty, inexorably intertwined. Just think what Weston would have done with my cauliflower fractals. Makes me slightly fuzzy even thinking about it.
So what is the message in this rambling nonsense?
Well, I say to thee, go forth and photograph yummy veggies or nude women, either will do. They both represent shining examples of the exquisite form and beauty of mother nature’s finest creations. Look at your subject. Squeeze her sweet juicy flesh, feel the way the light caresses her sensual curves. Really look beyond what an ordinary person would see and discover just how sensual this object is. Is she not the most exotic, erotic, aesthetically perfect thing you’ve ever seen? Now try to use your most excellent photographic skills to capture what you’ve just seen on camera, whilst still maintaining that element of surprise. Your objective is to try to show reality from a different perspective, to captivate your viewer and make him really see as you do.
Ivory Flame
Mmm…all these brassicas are making me starving. Time to cook my beloved object of beauty for dinner (the vegetable I mean, not the nude.) It’s a crying shame but it’s gotta be done. Can’t let art get in the way of stuffing my stomach you know.
Food + art = fully satiated nude.
Yum.
Lin is on a diet. Lin is starving. Lin is obsessing about sexy nekkid veggies again. Yeah, I know….you’re all frantically clicking the X button and vowing to come back in a few days time, but bear with me for a moment. (It gets hungrier, I promise.)
Whilst drooling over tonight’s dinner, it occurred to me that veggie porn is in fact an instrument for learning more about photography as well as about new and interesting ways to stuff your gob. Natural unprocessed food is a thing of beauty. Yeah I know you might experience your deepest artistic creative vision whilst gazing on the carbonated rectangle that comprises your instant ready-meal lasagne, but I’m talking about something much more profound that that. I’m talking about how gazing at your pert, firm, ripe, luscious veggies really teaches you to see.
Photography is often regarded as an instrument for teaching things, a way of discovering something new. A good photograph shows you something you hadn’t considered before, it reveals a new truth that you didn’t previously know.
Nature photographs illustrate my point perfectly. Consider a totally groovy photograph like the following piece by Weston (who else?) Doesn’t it just blow your mind? This might be lost on many of you, but personally this gives me a high nearly as good as the warm and fuzzy glowing feeling I get after boozing on one of bt’s mojito recipes.
At first I mistook it for an elegantly draped piece of cloth. I mean – wow! That looks like a fashion shot which could easily grace the pages of Vogue. Initially when you look at it, you don’t realise what the subject really is because the photograph is deliberately ambiguous, at least when seen from a distance. When you study it a bit more closely and you realise it’s a cabbage, it is that element of surprise is what makes you go, “Cool!”
This element of trickery, or teaching your viewer to see something new, is what draws us in to the photograph, and makes us linger over its beauty. It’s human nature to try and figure out what something means, and it is precisely this element of surprise which makes this photograph such compulsive viewing. Weston wasn’t like the rest of us, he could really see the hidden form in nature, and it was this ability to capture on camera the very different way he perceived the world, which made him a Master of Photography.
Of course Rich has a smidgen of a way to go before he reaches Weston’s standard, but he hasn’t let that deter him. Veggie art still has a lot to teach the amateur photographer. We all have to start somewhere after all. I mean, who hasn’t gone to their fridge in a moment of photographic desperation and picked out a pepper and tried to photograph it? C’mon…admit it, we’ve all done it. It’s part of the photographic learning process you know. Today a pepper, tomorrow a nude. Everything is a fine art photograph if you know how to look at it properly.
Actually I jealously guard my peppers (tonight’s ratatouille you know) but I’m slightly more footloose and fancy-free with my brassicas, so here’s a much less-talented and predictable example of veggie porn:
A Fluffy Cauli
It is of course a cauliflower (steam florets lightly for 20 mins and then mash - dee-lish!) Now is this not one of the most beautiful vegetables you’ve ever seen? Mother nature is both superlative artist and perfect mathematician. Maths, art and food are all expressions of beauty, inexorably intertwined. Just think what Weston would have done with my cauliflower fractals. Makes me slightly fuzzy even thinking about it.
So what is the message in this rambling nonsense?
Well, I say to thee, go forth and photograph yummy veggies or nude women, either will do. They both represent shining examples of the exquisite form and beauty of mother nature’s finest creations. Look at your subject. Squeeze her sweet juicy flesh, feel the way the light caresses her sensual curves. Really look beyond what an ordinary person would see and discover just how sensual this object is. Is she not the most exotic, erotic, aesthetically perfect thing you’ve ever seen? Now try to use your most excellent photographic skills to capture what you’ve just seen on camera, whilst still maintaining that element of surprise. Your objective is to try to show reality from a different perspective, to captivate your viewer and make him really see as you do.
Ivory Flame
Mmm…all these brassicas are making me starving. Time to cook my beloved object of beauty for dinner (the vegetable I mean, not the nude.) It’s a crying shame but it’s gotta be done. Can’t let art get in the way of stuffing my stomach you know.
Food + art = fully satiated nude.
Yum.
Labels: composition, food, IvoryFlame
posted by Lin at 8:03 AM
6 Comments:
Great post, Weston ROCKS...and I love the Fluffy Cauli.
And I ponder??...how many of us get to in fact "eat" our models?
Of course I am talking about the Fluffy Cauli (for those of you with dirty minds, shame on you!).
bt
I have only one experience with veggie porn that occurred when I was about ten. The knowledge gained should be passed on.
Men should not core out eggplant. Stains you purple.
Oh honey, you are preaching to the choir here. I just picked tomatoes and cucumbers from the neighbor's garden (don't worry, with permission) and arranged them on a platter. I haven't refrigerated them because I want to be able to see them all the time. Eventually I will make a lovely salad and chew them all up. But for now, the round red cheeks of the tomatoes and the long, sturdy shape of the big cukes are giving me much visual pleasure.
I even like the way they smell, a little of good fresh dirt. If this means I'm a veggie perv, so be it.
Great post. Two recipes tomorrow, one for you, one for Rich (although it may not be his cup of tea, so to speak).
Your Cauliflower look like a thunder-head building, looks like a good rain! See, this is what I meant by the knowledge you've built up. You've done the hardest part the rest is creative and fun, just think what you'll be able to do!
Thanks Michael but the cauli shot is Rich's, not mine. I wish my feeble attempts as lighting were even half as good as his :-)
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