Not Just Coffee: Coffee + Creativity = Art

When I first started painting with coffee back in 2002 I would get asked if others were painting with the same medium. This is something I had not considered up to that point. If I was doing it surly someone else was, Zeitgeist and all right? I Googled coffee art and one of the first sites I came across was http://www.justcoffeeart.com, the Web site of Andy Saur and Angel Sarkela-Saur.

At the time they had several works in coffee but the themes were centered around wildlife, nature and some portraits. None of which made sense to me as to why they would paint these things in coffee. I wasn’t thrilled with their style either. As time went on they started producing works with coffee themes but not many. I’m still not into the subject matter that they choose but their style is growing on me.

Their web site is very well put together and is definitely worth a gander for anyone interested in coffee as a medium.

It has been fun to read about how other artists have made coffee into a medium. In Andy and Angel’s case they experimented with trying to sketch with the bean and grinding it up to make pastels. In my trials, grinding the beans and attempting to suspend them in linseed oil and acrylic can be added to attempted techniques. I found that using coffee as a watercolor worked best as did they. It’s funny how people from different parts of the country or the world can come up with the same idea, trouble shoot the issues met and create beautiful art.