Food Art and Trompe L'Oeil

 

Food is art and art is food – a feast for the eyes.  They say you eat with your eyes first but to create a visual delight both the chef and the artist need inspiration a starting point that gets the juices flowing that provides the spark to light the fire of passion that becomes the artwork.

 

I remember the inspiration for my Trompe L’Oeil  dish ‘BBQ’d Mackerel’, it was an afternoon walk along the back lane behind my studio in Port Douglas.  It was one of those balmy tropical afternoons.  The lane leads up to the lookout and then down a long flight of steps to Four Mile beach.  The view from the top is magnificent – out across the Coral Sea to Low Isles and the Great Barrier Reef beyond and down below, over the balustrade and down the craggy rock face to the sea lapping over the ancient granite boulders far below.  Fishermen stand and cast their lines far out into the clear water but this afternoon it was different.


 

It wasn’t the endless turquoise water, calm inside the reef, or the stretch of white sand along the beach fringed with coconut palms that seems to run off into infinity, nor the yachts bobbing on the swell or the deep blue Queensland sky it was the waft of bbq’d fish drifting up from below that provided the inspiration.  One of the fishermen had lit a fire and was turning his catch over the hot coals.  The aroma was delicious, I wanted to leap over the handrail and join him.  Fond memories of beach bbqs, of sipping glasses of wine around a bonfire on summer nights, of waking from a night slept beneath the stars on the sand, the smell of the coals still smoldering.   All these flashes of inspiration. 

BBQ'd Mackerel

I love Trompe L’Oeil, the illusion, the trick to appear what it is not.  I needed to capture that moment the fish was lifted from the fire still steaming with the burn marks of the griddle striped across it.  That peculiar flavor that bbq’d fish has, a slightly burnt delicious taste that fills the senses and screams ‘Freedom’.  I wanted, as far as is possible, to make the painted plate of bbq’d Mackerel indistinguishable from the real thing.  I wanted, every time I looked at it, to be transported back to that moment I smelt the fisherman’s catch cooking on that fire on the rocks.