La Fôret Noire

This painting, La Fôret Noire, started as a visual study of my partner’s favorite cake—the Black Forest cake. Which we discovered is a specialty of the French, not the Americans. Thus, the title in French. Following my own birthday in August, I reprised with a birthday painting (as well as a birthday cake) for him, in September.

The particularity of this painting was its consistency of gestural brush strokes, stripes barely distinguishable in tonality, and an ensemble look that also could be read as a whole square. It repeats nearly identical reddish-black stripes that aim to evoke dark chocolate and crushed marinated cherries. The stripes help reference layers in a cake, but this was incidental.

Effectively, I was more focused on colors that felt ‘delicious’—than ‘looked’ delicious. The result was something visually dense and integrated—as a cake should be. It is also one of those paintings where I was conscious that it simultaneously makes an allusion to an idea. While working viscerally as a pure painting—literally as a square of paint on canvas. For me, the result was something raw and finished, something iconic… something subtle and restrained.

–STELIOS author of The Oculus