5 food paintings we’re savouring on our Heart List this week
Food painting rarely gets the attention it deserves. Too often, it’s tucked under the broad label of still life and dismissed as decorative, familiar, or somehow less significant than other subjects. But these artists prove just how much depth, emotion, and creative possibility can exist within something as ordinary as a meal, a fruit, or a slice of cake.
At Arts to Hearts, we spend our days discovering artists from around the world, exploring every medium, style, and subject imaginable. Yet this week, one theme kept appearing in our feeds and demanding our attention: food. Not because it was trendy or nostalgic, but because these artists were using it in ways that felt fresh, unexpected, and impossible to ignore. Some transformed everyday ingredients into vibrant celebrations of color and culture, while others used food to explore memory, identity, comfort, and connection.
As we kept saving artwork after artwork, we realized we had stumbled upon something worth sharing. So for this week’s Heartlist, we thought, why not bring together some of the most captivating food paintings and the brilliant artists behind them? From richly detailed compositions to playful contemporary interpretations, these works remind us that food is never just food—it’s a story, a memory, a ritual, and sometimes even a portrait of who we are.
This is our heartlist for this week.
01. Shrimply the Best by Mylène Tax @mylenetax
First on our heartlist this week is Shrimply the Best by Mylène Tax and the title alone should tell you what kind of artist she is. This is the opening piece in her new series about food, sharing, conversation and the stories that get told at dinner tables, and what a way to start. Painted from above, the whole canvas becomes a table a striped blue and white cloth, a plate of shrimp with lemon, a glass of red wine, a pearl necklace draped casually across the scene, bread rolls sitting just where someone left them. It is intimate and abundant and a little bit luxurious all at once. It does not just show you food. It shows you the specific atmosphere of a meal with people you love, that hour when nobody is in a hurry and everything on the table becomes part of the conversation. Mylène is a Dutch painter, graphic designer and photographer based in Zeeland, who describes herself as a visual poetry seeker with a special attraction for everything that tastes like a memory. Her Sea You at Dinner series is built entirely around this idea — tables as storytellers, meals as memories — and this piece is a perfect introduction to that world.
Her full series is worth exploring — every painting on her page carries this same warmth and specificity.
02. A Table Full of Love Commission by Lei @leighlalap
Second on our heartlist this week is this gloriously joyful commission by Lei and we defy anyone to scroll past it without smiling. A Filipino feast spreads across the entire canvas from above, bursting with colour watermelon slices, mango, sausages, eggs, flowers, dishes stacked and overlapping in the most wonderfully chaotic way. And peering over the top of it all, four fluffy little dogs who look like they have been waiting very patiently for someone to stop painting and start eating. The whole thing is painted in acrylic with a boldness and confidence that is impossible to miss every colour pushed to its fullest, every texture distinct, the whole canvas humming with energy and warmth and that specific feeling of a table full of food shared with people you love. This is the kind of painting that only comes from someone who genuinely loves what they are painting, every single detail chosen with care and real delight. A commission that clearly meant something to everyone involved.
Give her a follow and see the rest of her work every piece on her page has this same colour and joy running through it.
3. Seafood Feast by Llael McDonald @llaelmcdonaldartist
So, this oil painting Seafood Feast, by Llael McDonald, is our number three this week and the moment you see it, you understand immediately why it stopped us. A whole lobster, oysters, mussels in a copper pot, a wedge of lemon, garlic cloves scattered just so, and a glass of champagne catching the light in the background. It is abundant and precise and deeply, deeply pleasurable to look at.
The way Llael handles the copper of that pot against the cool grey surface, the warmth of the lobster shell, the way the glass of champagne glows quietly in the back every material is distinct, every texture convincing, every element placed with total intention. This is Llael’s whole practice in one composition finding the emotional weight inside the completely ordinary, the things we overlook that shape who we actually are.
She is a Melbourne-based artist who trained at the Independent College of Art and Design, has been building one of the most quietly compelling practices in Australian still life for over two decades, and holds work in collections across New York, London, Sydney, Paris, Norway and Italy.
Give her a follow and spend time with her full body of work every painting rewards a slow look.
4. Más Huevos Para la Colección by Nia @miuniart
Fourth on our heartlist this week is this oil on panel by Miuni and the contrast with what came before it is exactly what makes it so compelling. Where Benedicenti chased reality to its absolute limit, Nia goes somewhere else entirely. Pink shadows, purple forks, teal reflections catching the light across the plate, that yolk glowing in a ring of deep orange and gold like a small sun.
The same subject a fried egg taken in a completely different direction and made just as extraordinary. This is colour used as the primary language, pushed well beyond what the eye actually sees in a kitchen, and yet the painting never loses the feeling of the thing itself.
That is the skill. Miuni’s egg series has become a signature of her practice each piece a study in how much a single ordinary subject can hold when you give it a different palette, a different light, a different emotional register entirely. Small in scale, enormous in presence.
Her feed is worth exploring from start to finish every piece in this series says something different.
05. Viennetta by Joël Penkman @joelpenkman
Fifth on our heartlist this week is Viennetta by Joël Penkman — and there is something deeply, specifically joyful about a painting of an ice cream cake that has no business being this good. The layers of cream and chocolate crumble, those distinctive scalloped ridges, the slightly melted edges all of it rendered in egg tempera with a quiet precision that elevates a supermarket dessert into something genuinely beautiful.
Joël is a New Zealand artist based in Liverpool, originally trained as a graphic designer, who taught herself egg tempera in 2011 and never looked back. Egg tempera is one of the oldest painting mediums in existence made by mixing egg yolk with powdered pigment and in Joël’s hands it produces this extraordinary semi-photorealistic quality, soft and luminous and completely unlike anything oil or acrylic achieves.
Her clients include McDonald’s, Bombay Sapphire, Waitrose, the Financial Times and Phaidon, and her work has shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. But it is the personal work the biscuits, the sweets, the ice creams, the Viennetta that shows you exactly who she is as an artist. Someone who finds the extraordinary inside the completely ordinary, every single time.
Give her a follow and spend time with her full body of work it will make you look at everything you eat differently.
That is our heartlist for this week. Five artists, five paintings, and a reminder that food might be the most democratic subject in all of art — everyone understands it, everyone has a relationship with it, and in the right hands it becomes something that goes far beyond the plate. Go follow these artists and let their work find you properly.
One more thing. The 101 Art Book: Pattern Edition by Arts to Hearts Project is open right now and if pattern is any part of how you work, this is worth your attention. Texture, repetition, rhythm, structure the series has explored themes from Floral to Animal to Portrait and this newest edition is dedicated entirely to pattern in all its forms. 101 artists selected, published in a beautifully produced hardcover distributed globally through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the Arts to Hearts Project Shop. Open internationally to all artists 18 and above.
