Costa Rica Coffee Printing "Cafegrafia®" - Saul Bolanoz

Costa Rica has some very interesting coffee art that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Not just paintings with coffee but also a printing process where they can reproduce images using a coffee printing process. You can get images on cards, coffee filters and even money reproduced in finely ground coffee. To top this off there is a photography printing process that adds a very unique and warm feeling to the photograph.

The printing process is vague. No real detail other than it is printed with real finely ground coffee and is sealed to retain the aroma for many years (under refrigeration.) From their description, you can taste the coffee if you like. I’ve tasted my highly concentrated paint and it’s not what I want to do! They boast that it will not fade in light. I may have to put that to the test. I do like the images they are presenting. These are similar scenes I would like to paint when I start my travels to coffee producing countries.

This started in Costa Rica in 1988 as a photographic process that was termed CAFEGRAFIA® (coffee graphics) or coffee art. It was a process of coffee impression (photographic) directly onto light sensitive ceramic glaze. The ceramic tiles were coated with an emulsion capable of reacting with liquid coffee. Not all the detail was captured in this process. The artist was Saul Bolanoz.

In looking for a process that would retain all details he extracted light sensitive oils from the green coffee berries. This produced an excellent photographic image without handwork at all. It had limitations though. It took 10 minutes to expose, too long for production. The oil was broken down in to oils (it was a combination). Using the oil that was faster time was brought down to 1 minute but was color blind. It was evolved, not sure how, to be sensitive to the full color spectrum and expose in 5 seconds. This was about 1992.

In a third process, silver emulsion was used. By chemical means, the metallic image produced by processing the same, could be made to react with coffee (liquid or powdered). This process was used through 1995.

Soul wanted to print directly to anything, literally. Spoons, plates even eggs. He used small glazed ceramic plates and metal spoons. This ran through 1995.

His 6^th coffee imaging process started around 1994 and consisted of 100% coffee images produced on filter paper making it a drinkable art. These became available to the public in 1995.

There is also a section on the web site that shows coffee images on the wood of the coffee plant. The site describes the process in some detail.

I am very curios about all of this. When I go to Costa Rica a plan to stop in a visit this artist if that is possible. I will definitely look into some of the techniques described on this web site and who know, I may incorporate some if the techniques into my work. At the very least I plan to send some of my coffee paintings to be reproduced with the coffee printing technique!

Costa Rica Coffee Art

Ezju's links
No Such Animal Studios (coffee culture painting series)
Coffee Culture Merchandise
Ezju's Blog at SharpLogic Software