![Mike Geno](https://culturecheesemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Cheese-painting.jpeg)
Planet Cheese is a weekly blog devoted to everything cheese: products, people, places, news, and views. James Beard Award–winning journalist Janet Fletcher writes Planet Cheese from her home in Napa Valley. Janet is the author of Cheese & Wine, Cheese & Beer, and The Cheese Course and an occasional contributor to culture. Visit janetfletcher.com to sign up for Planet Cheese and view Janet’s current schedule of cheese appreciation classes.
They say a picture is worth . . . well, you know. Who needs words to appreciate Cowgirl Creamery Devil’s Gulch when you have Mike Geno’s appetizing depiction? You want to grab a baguette and a knife and dive in. Geno’s luscious portraits convey the peppery scent of Devil’s Gulch (above); the slouch in a pudgy slice of Grayson; the cool, marbled elegance of Bay Blue. Now, with nearly 300 cheeses under his belt, is it time to move on?
You’re a fine-art painter with a cheese obsession. There must be a back story.
![caerphilly](https://culturecheesemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Caerphilly1-300x150.jpeg)
Caerphilly: real and imagined
It wasn’t intentional. Someone had given me a gift certificate for Di Bruno Bros in Philadelphia. I didn’t consider Di Bruno’s a place where I could shop because of my budget, but everybody in Philly knows Di Bruno. I told the cheesemongers I had this $25 gift certificate and didn’t know what to do with it, and they knew exactly how to talk to people like me. I fell in love with Caerphilly and said, “I’ll take $25 worth of that.”
The painting happened because I couldn’t just eat it. It was too beautiful: very cake-like with this interesting rind and change of color from the outside in. It reminded me of a Wayne Thiebaud painting.
I wondered if Thiebaud was an inspiration. Your style is similar.
When I was younger, whether I was painting a cupcake or a slab of meat, I was trying to translate what I found attractive. I was using the quality of the brush strokes to further describe my subject, beyond just color and shape. When I started to work that way, people said, “You really should look at Wayne Thiebaud.” I went to a museum and saw his work and was in a daze. He uses very thick paint to make his cake paintings, and his indulgence in saturated color and juicy brush strokes make me salivate.
And then one cheese portrait led to another…?
I needed a new body of work for a show, and I remembered that I had met Madame Fromage at a party. She told me she had a cheese blog. So I e-mailed her and asked if there were more places to get cheese than Di Bruno’s, and were there even enough worthy cheeses to do a series of 25 or 30?
That was 300 cheese paintings ago.
The cheese world, as it turned out, provided a subject where I could tap into community and connect the audience to what they eat, to nourishment and tradition. The best cheesemongers don’t just sell you a product, they sell you a story and a community with it, and I feel like that’s important. This would be really boring if I wasn’t thinking about the stories.
That’s why I call them portraits, not paintings. They felt like portraits from the beginning. I felt like they had a lot of personality.
How hard is cheese to paint?
Some people have said to me, “You paint cheese? How do you make the paint stick to it?”
![Greek Feta](https://culturecheesemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/GreekFeta.jpeg)
Greek Feta
It depends on the size of the painting and complexity, but I paint them in 6 to 11 hours. I have to work fast. With runny cheese, there’s pressure to be really quick. If I don’t get it right before it starts moving, I have to start over. I learned not to do Epoisses in summer; that was a mistake.
I love a challenge, so I did Bay Blue with foil crumpled around it. But the cheeses with the least features are the most challenging. For feta, I had light coming from the right, and on the left side, out of the picture plane, I had a yellow-orange sheet of paper that reflected back so the shadow side had warmer color. I try to taste a little before I start painting, but I don’t think that does anything magical.
![Ocean Brie-eze](https://culturecheesemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/PC2-02299_Ocean_Brie-eze.jpg)
Ocean Brie-eze
When Peter and Rachel Dixon (from Parish Hill Creamery) were in Hawaii, Rachel found a squid-ink brie. I said, “You need to bring some of that back for my map project!” (Geno hopes to paint cheese from all 50 states.) I knew it was my only chance of getting Hawaiian cheese. It was so ripe when I got it that I knew I had only one shot at it. I took a photograph just in case, but I painted as quickly as I could. I knew from experience to focus on the paste first—the rind wasn’t going to change much. It worked, but it was a close call.
You almost never put anything else in these paintings. No trays, no implements.
I love making it an isolated subject. People have said to me, “Finally, cheese is center stage instead of just a prop in a still life.”
Is the end in sight?
I don’t know. For the last couple of years, I’ve been waiting for the interest to die. I’ve kept my prices low because I know most of my buyers are not art collectors but cheese lovers. But new people are discovering my work, and I found out there’s never going to be a shortage of cheese. I thought I would get tired of it, but I feel like I’m getting better. If I’m bored, the painting will be boring. There’s no way of bullshitting it really. If you see a painting and think it’s successful, that artist was probably very much enjoying the process.