An Art With Aroma - Coffee Painting

What would you look for in chill, cool and freeze winter or cloudy & cold monsoon? Of course – a cup of warm and wet coffee!! What would be your answer if I ask you to use coffee in other way? Artist truly enjoys coffee while creating new art work. Coffee has always been creative lighter fluid. Coffee adds on a lot of inspiration, freshness, creation and mood. However would you not raise your eyebrows if I say – coffee is good for painting? Does it make sense? Amita & Mira Chudasama – coffee artists have answers for these all doubts.

All those coffee lovers can feel proud that now coffee goes arty too. As refreshing as freshly brewed coffee with its heavenly aroma, the coffee pigment amazingly lends itself to be a perfect but unique art medium. These two young artists have been creating portraits, tribal, wild life, ruins, carvings, cultural sentiments & life style, modern abstract art, various forms of dance & dancer, landscapes and a lot of expressions with "coffee" since five to six years. A sharp portrayal of Banjara (tribal) woman by Mira is a visual treat.

"Coffee is a mesmerizing, attractive, appealing and creative medium to shape art. It is quite successful experiment using coffee to shape up old, aged or ruined subject. Coffee painting produces perpetual shining & aroma. Uniqueness achieved by coffee painting cannot be delivered by any other medium." expresses Mira based on her experience with coffee painting. While discussing her styles, she said "Coffee can be used similar to watercolor".

Painting with other medium is definitely not new. Few other experiments have been done with tea, spices, bananas or Espresso by various artists. But when we toss for these artists’ portraits and cultural art work – we would love to spend our valuable time to notice over or keep watching paintings smelling light aroma of coffee. Mira also explains about their artistic usage of clay with coffee painting. "In our few paintings, we used clay base to give an embossed look and more depth to the chosen theme".

Her painting - "Coliseum" is nice & proving example of using coffee as best medium to construct such historical building on canvas. However Amita says "Painting with coffee is quite different to painting with other mediums. It is difficult to control flow of water, tones and lines" while carving such structures on canvas. Painting with coffee needs definitely change in a tradition of making painting."

While revealing this fabulous art, artists expressed their wish of art lovers’ attention. "Recently, we came to know about other coffee artists who did great paintings with "Coffee" including Pornchai Lerthammasiri, Ezju, Andy and Angel and Karen Eland. And we appreciate wonderful idea to promote coffee as painting medium displaying our work together under one roof.

Turkish says "Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and as sweet as love." No doubts, answering to waiter – you may say ‘I would take coffee, only water, brush and with a canvas’. And marketing strategist for Starbuck, Nescafe or any other coffee house would be creating strategies to sell coffee as pigment replacing oil color, acrylic or poster color pigments.

For these artists, probably now it’s really artistic to say "Behind every successful woman...is a substantial amount of coffee". To have a sip of coffee art, have a visit to Amita & Mira’s art cafe - www.artandpainting.net.