Foodways Paintings

Foodways Paintings from The Olfactory Present: By Means of Smoke. Watercolor and gouache on Arches cold press paper, each 89 1/2 inches x 30 1/4 inches, 2022-2025.

Project Notes

Foodways Paintings from The Olfactory Present: By Means of Smoke operate at the intersection of contemporary art and sensory ethnography. Over the course of one year, artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter interviewed four immigrant home cooks to explore how knowledge is conveyed through food. The stories told and the recipes shared informed the series Foodways Paintings, which articulate the efforts made by immigrant cultures to maintain culinary traditions in new environments. 

Each painting is intended to be read from a bird’s-eye-view perspective. The figurative ground is a two-tone map of Linda Vista, the San Diego neighborhood that gave rise to this project. The focal point of each painting is a dish that the artist learned to cook. Surrounding the dish are representations of the  ingredients—spices, vegetables, fats—that give each dish its signature taste and aroma. Strewn around the composition are representations of texts, including fragments of interview transcripts between the artist and the cook, as well as post-it notes containing observations drawn from the artist’s field notes.

At seven-and-a-half feet wide, the enormous scale of Goeltzenleuchter’s Foodways Paintings turns watercolor from something small, gentle, and private into something monumental, authoritative, and conceptually charged—directly contradicting the stereotypes of fragility and modesty associated with the medium. By adopting an illusionistic realism, the paintings render food in a way that feels tactile, evoking the physical reality of food as a lived, intimate, and culturally embedded practice.