Who doesn't love bacon?! Even my most Jewish of friends love the stuff, or at very least salivate at its mere mention. As a culinary want-a-be myself, bacon is breathing. And still, my son loves it more than I do.
As most culinary challenges that peek my curiosity, the makin' of bacon presented itself as my next cooking challenge. With one call to my local butcher, Edwardsville Frozen Foods, I was awarded with nine pounds of pork belly. Eight days of brining, two hours of smoking and 10 minutes of frying later, this is what I created:
A lot of my paintings are inspired, or come directly from images that I have captured with my iPhone and shared on my Instagram feed. My painting, Slabs of Bacon, is an adapted oil painting from one such Instagram image:
While I might not be the right artist to paint a photo-realist painting of a photo like the one above, I certainly was the right artist to attempt to paint Slabs of Bacon in my own style. What developed is what I think is a real quirky and funny painting ... of bacon. Why I chuckle at it, I don't know. Maybe its the idea of the simplicity of slabs of meat on a cutting board. Maybe its funny how bacon has exploded into a pop-culture phenomenon, and now its being immortalized in an oil painting. I don't know, but bacon makes me happy, and so does this painting. What do you think of it?
