At the Cafe
* Artist: Ezju
* Year: 2003
* Width: 28"
* Height: 21"
* Medium: Whidbey's French Roast
* Support: Watercolor Paper


Pike Place Performers
* Artist: Ezju
* Year: 2003
* Width: 20"
* Height: 16"
* Medium: Coffee
* Support: Clayboard
* 16" x 20" Original: Private Collection of Mark Stefnik


Late Night Drip
* Artist: Ezju
* Year: 2005
* Width: 24"
* Height: 18"
* Medium: Sysco Coffee
* Support: Clayboard


I have posted about coffee art earlier. And during my search on the web, I was quite surprised by how this art has been explored. And although the media seems to be limited, actually it’s rich. Some artists did some experiment on many kinds of coffee, even add a pigment to it, and achieved great works.

I copied these interviews of Ezju (many thanks to Ezju for his permission) and Professor Pornchai (both of them are Coffee paint Artist with excellent works).


Ezju’s Interview with Ph’Kaki

Ph’Kaki: Describe your coffee "paint" making process.

Ezju: I knew coffee would stain and would be quite permanent. I have enough white business shirts embarrassed just before important meetings to know its resilience. What I found with my first coffee sketch was the tonal range was limited even with glazing.

Being the curious lad that I am the experiments to create a coffee medium was on. I tried several recipes from adding coffee to acrylic medium to brewing coffee in linseed oil and met some limited achievement. Then I remembered a old school exercise where the students would boil down salt water to find concentrated salt left on the bottom of the pan so I tried condensing large amounts of coffee.

Ph’Kaki: What is your coffee painting technique?

Ezju: I have a couple. The first is applying the coffee paint much like a watercolor depending on full saturation for the darks and thinning the paint out with water for the lighter tonal values. Some times I add a bit of pigment for more colorful image.

The second technique is layering coffee paint, applied by brush or hand, between en caustic (wax medium) applications and building up layers.

Ph’Kaki: What do you find most unique about coffee as an artistic medium?

Ezju: Using food products as an artistic medium has been done periodically throughout history. Some artists use food as a sensory stimulant to produce their art and use food products as well.Most people don't know that if you mix salmon eggs and goose feces you'll get a rich red pigment or if you take horse urine and put it on copper the chemical reaction produces a wonderful blue pigment.

What does this all have to do with coffee being unique? Coffee is a global commodity and social icon that most cultures can relate to on some level. It's a social equalizer of sorts. It's not something one expects to see on a canvas but it does very well there to produce images as well as open minds to a different way of thinking.


Proffessor Pornchai’s Interview with Asia-art,net

Q3: How hard is it to use coffee to paint compared to normal watercolor paint?
A.: First of all, the texture of the coffee is a challenge. It has more elastic properties than normal paint. It is stickier when you apply it with the brush. You have to use the right amount of water to dilute the coffee right on the paper for the lighter brown or whiter areas. It was also harder to control the lines, color tones and the flow of liquid on the paper.
Further more, coffee also when it dried displayed glittering flakes in itself and left unwanted traces of this in the paintings. I had to use special techniques to control these flakes on the paper. Another big problems was that after the coffee paintings are completed the painting can mold easily. Furthermore, the color on the paintings can peel off from the paper. Through years of experimenting, I found ways to overcome these problems but it was not easy.

Q4: If coffee is so hard to paint with, why do you continue to do so?
A.: I kept on trying because it seemed like a great challenge for me. Coffee gave a unique effect through the stain it left on the paper and the unique flow of water mixed with coffee is unpredictable. All of this is a challenge, which I had to strive to solve.

Q5: Do you always paint in coffee alone or sometimes mix colors or other medium with it?
A.: I prefer to use monotone coloration’s of brown in my paintings, but I also mix watercolor with coffee in some paintings to create colors other than brown. It is harder to paint in monotone and still make the painting interesting and that challenge is what I like.

Q6: What themes are you using coffee to paint?
A.: Mostly old-time scenes or history like themes. I also paint landscape like the ocean, forest or building scenes.

Q7: What is the potential of this kind of painting in the market? And what have been the public’s reactions to this way of paintings?
A.: I had my first show of coffee painting in 1998 at the Gaisorn Plaza in Bangkok, Thailand. Over 600 guests attended the exhibition and most of the paintings were sold. The people enjoyed the new idea in art and the unique quality that it produced. I think the viewers found that it was interesting to use something close to them that they see or use daily, like coffee, to apply in the art form.

Q8: What is your future plan and what are your new challenges?
A.: I plan to use different themes to my coffee paintings, for example: pictures of the old-time settings from the Oregon Trail in the Northwest of the US. I feel that it will be very charming with the coffee effects. My new challenge and hope is that one of the coffee companies like Starbucks or others will sponsor me and let me try different types of their coffee on my paintings. I’m always amazed at how many types of coffee the companies offer and wonder whether those various coffees would give different effects on my paintings.