Cheese: We love to smell it, eat it and dream about it. In addition to enhancing our culinary experiences, cheese provides a muse for the world of art. From paintings to sculptures and photographs of rinds, cheese is the model turning heads in galleries across the country. Learning to appreciate where our food comes from requires an understanding of its living beauty, and many artists draw inspiration from what they love to eat and the animals that provide sustenance.
Local artist Ginger Shaw’s whimsical creations are the stuff of dreams. This talented interior designer from Naples (she now lives in Tampa) developed an affection for food when she started working in the restaurant industry to help pay for her degree. The subjects of her paintings range from abstract tributes to animals we consume everyday to animated vegetables one might find on the pages of Alice in Wonderland.
Shaw’s most recent painting, “Wine and Cheese Dreams,” represents her passion for the titular food and drink. This stunning work embraces the euphoria that both wine and cheese inspire (especially together). Shaw playfully incorporated recycled materials and cheese labels into her painting, the art creating feelings of freedom, warmth, sleepiness, exhilaration, excitement and pure bliss. Her painting transfers to canvas the feeling of contentment one has after pairing the perfect bottle of wine with a chunk of expertly made cheese.
When asked about her inspiration for the piece, Shaw said, “Cheese takes on the characteristics of the land in which the animal that produced the milk grazed, just like wine. Why not produce artwork showcasing and celebrating cheese? It’s an essential piece of our whole entire world!”
Mike Geneo, a Philadelphia-based artist recently featured in the magazine Culture: the word on cheese, was originally inspired to paint cheese by a chunk of Gorwydd Caerphilly. This treat made of raw cow’s milk from England has a sweet, grassy earthiness that Geneo captured in his first cheese painting. Your mouth will water when you gaze at his reproduction of the white center of this rustic cheese with its thick velvety rind.
He explains his compulsion in the Culture article, writing, “When I connect strongly with a subject like that, everything seems so natural in the process of the painting. I wanted more of it — more cheese and more experiences connecting to the world of this handcrafted food. Through paint I want to re-create the desire for a singular piece of cheese, as I experienced it, as well as the reward of eating it.” (Check out his works at mikegeno.com, which includes a link to his Etsy Shop.)
The growth in popularity of cheese sculpture has outgrown state fair competitions and gone mainstream. Sarah Kaufmann, aka “The Cheese Lady,” is a professional sculptor who uses cheese as her material of choice. Her gigantic creations are sought after for sporting events, weddings and corporate functions, with Kaufmann able to create anything out of a giant block of cheese. (She once sculpted a 150-pound reproduction of the helmets of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Green Bay Packers crashing into each other, à la the intro graphics to Monday Night Football.) Kaufmann admits to tasting the delicate ribbons that unravel from the original block from time to time, as she must monitor the quality of her muse.
When asked on her own site, sarahcheeselady.com, what she most likes to teach people at events, Kaufmann responded, “I like to invite spectators to taste — encouraging them to hold the cheese on their tongue longer, to let it warm up in their mouths so they can let more of the flavors come out of the cheese and fill their taste buds. We often eat far too quickly and miss out on a lot of the subtle flavors of cheese — a living ever changing thing …”
Kira Jefferson is the resident “cheese guru” at SideBern’s in South Tampa.
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2012.