My mom is an artist. I have fond childhood memories of her painting outside in our garage in the sweltering summer heat, looking like a deranged sweaty mess whenever inspiration struck. She’d be there all day and late into the night – usually it was an impending deadline for an approaching art show that would awaken this creative madness in her. As a child, I always thought she was a little weird, but now as a writer, I can sympathize. Her favorite subject was these giant close-up images of flowers. They were almost always roses. Sometimes she’d switch it up and do a traditional landscape or a portrait of some kind, but more often than not it was flowers. They’re what inspire her.
And artistic inspiration can come from anywhere. It’s an inexplicable phenomenon. But of all the random places to find artistic inspiration, Japanese art director Yuni Yoshida finds hers in the fruit bowl. Yoshida likes to create these surreal food compositions in which apples, oranges, bananas, and other food ingredients appear digitally pixelated and spliced together. Every work of art is edible and meticulously hand-crafted despite it looking digitized and Photoshopped.
Yoshida’s “Peel” series aims to create appetizing hybrid forms of fruit into mismatched jigsaw puzzles. Yoshida cleverly crafts her designs using parts of fruit with different hues or shades in order to create the illusion that some of the fruit is partly translucent or seemingly overlapping – almost like a real-life Venn diagram. For example in one of the art pieces, Yoshida combines banana and apple, using slices of orange peel in order to fill in the center portions.
In her “Pixelated” series, she reconfigures food into small cubes and rearranges them into a partial “blur” in order to give the illusion that the food is pixelated out. For example, she uses an entire burger in one of her works but then ends up using other bits of food and fruit in order to distort the image when she displaces some of the burger’s buns and meat patty.
She also does a few works in that it looks like the fruit’s skin is made out of paint and is dripping wet. No matter what spin she puts on her art, there is no denying that what she creates using food is nothing short of extraordinary.
You can follow Yoshida’s food art on Instagram, but for now, you can scroll down to see some of our favorite’s of hers. Let us know what you think!