Art is a Matter of Taste

CEBU, Philippines- When we were young, elders would often tell us to never play with our food. Clearly, photographer Carl Warner never heard that saying.

Carl Warner isn’t you regular artist. Rather than carving and slicing food individually and drawing silly faces on them like the usual person, Warner sees the bigger picture.

At first glance, Warner’s images look like paintings on canvas or digitally enhanced pictures of landscapes. But a closer look will assure you that his pictures are not screen captures from the motion picture “A Cloudy Chance of Meatballs”.

Made entirely out of edible items, Warner has mastered the art in food which he personally branded as “foodscapes.” The London-based photographer transforms strawberries and garlic into air balloons, broccolis into trees and loaves of bread into mountains.

The process is very time consuming, considering that each scene is photographed in layers from foreground to background. One project would take a couple of days to finish and building the set alone would take three days, which doesn’t include retouching and consultations.

In an interview last year, Warner states that, “Although I’m very hands-on, I do use model makers and food stylists to help me create the sets. I tend to start with a drawing which I sketch out in order to get the composition worked out.”

Warner hopes that his realistic depiction of food in artwork will give you a moment of surprise when you realize exactly what you’re looking at, and the fun of figuring what is what and how he did it.

“I tend to draw a very conventional landscape as I need to fool the viewer into thinking it is a real scene at first glance. It is the realization of what the real ingredients are that brings a smile, and for me that’s the best part,” says Warner.

In recent years, he has been asked by many advertising agencies throughout Europe to produce his distinctive one-of-a-kind images for clients in the food industry.