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Coffee art
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GREATLIFE | ARTIST
Crafting creations withcoffee
Have you ever gazed into your cup of coffee in the morning and waited for inspiration to hit?
Airdrie artist Melissa Bruglemans-LaBelle has, and inside her cup of joe is where she found her artistic muse.
Bruglemans-LaBelle began experimenting with the beloved morning beverage about four years ago.
“I ended up using coffee as a medium due to sheer laziness, with a dash of frustration in my previous work,” she says with a laugh.
She adds that she entered an art competition and at the time she was painting mainly with oil paints.
“Everyone said they ‘loved my work,’ but to me it felt like I was missing something,” Bruglemans-LaBelle says.
“I felt a little deflated by it. I stressed about detail, and a lot of times I was left uninspired. I felt that it wasn’t unique enough and frankly nobody was buying.”
She was worrying about this at the breakfast table while sipping on her morning caffeine fix when she had an epiphany.
“I saw a coffee stain on a sheet of white paper and thought ... to hell with it, I’ll bring a big sheet of watercolour paper and a cup of Tim Hortons coffee (to the competition) and see what happens,” she says.
To her surprise, she placed second, which skyrocketed her self-confidence and solidified the idea that a jolt of java is just what her creations needed.
COMPLICATED CAFFEINE It hasn’t been all cream and sugar – it turns out the artist had a lot to learn about how differently coffee performs than paint.
“It’s always different, always moving,” says Bruglemans-LaBelle.
“It has a mind of its own. At first, it was quite stressful. I was treating it like oil paints, trying to make the image into something it didn’t want to be. I was forcing detail in it and it only got worse. It wasn’t until I became patient with it and accepted its ‘imperfections,’ the splashes, splatters, rings and drips, making that part of the detail … that it got to a point of becoming relaxing.”
INSTANT INSPIRATION The artist says she gets her inspiration from photographs, common sayings or researching interesting facts and she is drawn to images with a lot of contrast and odd angles.
“I love painting with coffee but after a while I started to add different elements to it to help bring a bit more colour and interest to the subject matter,” she says.
“I wanted to bring even more depth and life to my paintings but didn’t want to do it through paint. I sometimes use natural dyes or pigments from fruit like cherries but most of the time my hints of colour come from origami paper, vintage pieces of wrapping paper, commercial packaging or candy wrappers.
She even adds bits of mixed media like Swarovski crystals or gold leafing to give it that extra sparkle.
The artist is also a fan of using vintage frames for larger pieces.
“I like adding certain interesting knickknacks or highlighting the flaws or imperfections of the frame,” she says.
“I feel it helps lend to the story of my subject matter. I’m drawn to the old, worn out and forgotten things. I feel that people today are always buying the newest and latest thing and they never seem happy with what they have ... and there was nothing wrong with what they had before. I’m in the mindset of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and if it does break ... mend and make do.”
CUP OF CANADIANA Bruglemans-LaBelle’s most popular coffee painting is the one she created of Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie.
“I painted him the day after he passed away,” she says.
“It was in my first year of painting with coffee. I was sitting in front of this really expensive piece of watercolour paper. I didn’t know what to paint and was scared to make a move because I didn’t want to ruin the sheet. The Tragically Hip was playing non-stop on the radio. I thought, well, let’s paint Gord and see what happens.”
She sold 100 limited-edition prints within a few weeks and donated $5 from each print to the Gord Downie Fund for Brain Cancer Research. To date, she has donated more than $1,000 to the fund.
“I think people like the Gord Downie painting because it exudes his personality,” she says. “It looks powerful, yet heartbreaking. It screams ‘Don’t wait! The time is now!’” life
