The Art of

Junk Food

• California/Chicago• Graduated with a B.S.

in Civil Engineering and an art minor with honors.

• Shortly after her return from an art residency in Japan, Johnson decided to seek new direction in her life and to focus on art as a career

Pamela Michelle Johnson

Artist Statement“Teetering towers of hamburgers, drippy stacks of syrupy waffles, sticky piles of sugary candy... Junk food. It's the taste of America. It is what we eat. It is who we are. The insatiable American appetite is set on a path of consumption. Devouring to the point where we are left with nothing, nothing but the consequential garbage. Quintessentially American, junk food is not just part of our diet, it epitomizes our cultural ideals and social norms. Through my work, I strive to invoke reflection on a culture focused on mass-consumption and mass-production, where the negative aspects of overindulgence are often forgotten or ignored. The work questions a culture that equates fulfillment, pleasure and happiness with what we consume.”

- Pamela Michelle Johnson

• Beacon, NY• She is an American

figurative realist painter. • “She has been painting

women and food for over twenty years and continues to address the intersections of food with body image, addiction, and unabating desire.” (source: theotherjournal.com)

Lee Price

“Many women have a complicated relationship with food, a situation artist Lee Price knows well. In her new series of work, Price explores emotional eating using herself as her subject.

New York-based portrait artist Lee Price is fascinated with the relationship between women and food. In a series that has taken over seven years to produce, Price features herself as the subject (with the exception of two images, one with her mother, one with a friend) gorging on bags of Cheetos, boxes of sweets, and pints of ice cream in very solitary, almost obscure locations including one’s bed or bathroom.

Price’s paintings are neither derived from nor aimed at producing humor. They’re based on very real eating disorders (which Price herself has suffered from in the past), and explore the obsession—and sometimes compulsive relationship—many women have with food.”

(source: thedailybeast.com)

• California• American painter best known for

his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figures.

• On October 14, 1994, Thiebaud was presented with the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton.

Wayne Thiebaud

In a contemporary art world enthralled with such stunts as Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, Thiebaud is wonderfully ungimmicky. He belongs more to a classical tradition of painting than to the Pop revolution that first propelled him to national attention in the 1960s. Then, the sweet everydayness of his cake and pie pictures looked like cousins of Andy Warhol’s soup cans.

But where Warhol was cool and ironic, Thiebaud was warm and gently comic, playing on a collective nostalgia just this side of sentimentality. He pushed himself as a painter—experimenting with brushstrokes, color, composition, light and shadow. The cylindrical cakes and cones of ice cream owed more to such masters of the still life as the 18th-century French painter Chardin, or the 20th-century Italian Giorgio Morandi, as critics have pointed out, than to the art trends of the time.

(source: www.smithsonianmag.com)