Painting Your Food: Talking with Franklin Einspruch

Pears, by Franklin Einspruch

Emma Jacobs

Franklin Einspruch began painting comics a couple of years ago. Fruits and vegetables pop up in his work pretty regularly, especially a lot of seasonal delicacies like pumpkins, cranberries and plums. We thought we’d ask him a couple of questions about painting his food, and eating it afterwards.
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PRK: How did you get started painting comics?

My first interest in art was cartooning, but it switched over to painting. After a decade of painting and several years of writing art criticism,  I became interested in comics again. Initially, I thought it would be a good way to combine my disparate and somewhat alternating impulses to paint and write. This turned out not to be the case at all – comics are not just illustrated writings or annotated drawings, but have to be conceived as a whole, just like paintings and essays. It took a couple of years to figure out what I wanted to do with the medium.

PRK: What strikes your fancy? When do you decide an idea’s worth sitting down to illustrate?

I determine it by feel. I take it on faith that everything merits attention, and if I’m paying attention in the right way, the profound will spring up out of normal, everyday living. I don’t have the exact quote, but Fairfield Porter once said that the perfect still-life arrangement would come from your family eating dinner and getting up from the table without clearing the dishes.

There’s a Zen proverb you’ll likely appreciate: “Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.” Cooked people are baked in the heat of meditation. I have plenty of cooking to do myself, but I aspire to that sensitivity.

PRK: Food seems to show up in a lot of your work. Why is that? What is food like as a subject?

A notable portion of the English language derives in one way or another from farming, so it’s pretty much guaranteed as you work with language that you’re going to run into food eventually. Too, food is a unique combination of choice and inevitability. You must eat -  and yet you make myriad idiosyncratic choices as you select, acquire, prepare, and consume your food, giving you specific references to work with. Successful art appeals both to universals and a desire for individuality and freshness, so it has a lot of experiential overlap with food.

Image from the I-70 Suite: OH, by Franklin Einspruch

The story behind Ohio–That comic was one episode of the I-70 Suite, in which I documented a road trip from Boston to Orange County, California, through Arizona and Nevada. The trip was necessary so I could take an ill-fated teaching job in California, but I was curious about this string of states that I had never seen. In eastern Ohio we drove through a foggy landscape that evoked the mist-covered hills of Song Dynasty painting, shot through with a strange, variable light as the sun went down.

PRK: Is it tough to eat your subjects after you paint them?

Maybe not tough, exactly, but after that pear had served me so well as a painting subject, it only seemed right to honor it before eating it. It was a sort of grace.
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Go to Franklin Einspruch’s website to look for (or purchase) edible items in more of his comics.