Eat your art out:

Each creation a masterpiece of cake

 

By Ken Turetzky

 

Raymond Nasher is one of Dallas's leading art patrons, with an eye for beauty and a reputation for good taste. And yet, when friends recently surprised him on his birthday with a Jean DuBuffet sculpture, "The Gossiper," Nasher could hardly bring himself to eat it — but he did.

 

"It was wonderful," he says.

 

What Nasher and friends really ate was an Artcake, an edible recreation of a classic piece of art. Artcakes are a product of Oggetti (Italian for "objects"), a company run by former art history majors Julie Richey and Laura Larsen out of Richey's East Dallas home.

 

Nasher has the real "Gossiper," a 12-foot-tall piece of painted polyester resin, on display among many other artworks in his back yard. He treasures the sculpture that he and late wife Patsy bought about 10 years ago in St. Paul de venc, France.

 

"It's DuBuffet himself sitting on a throne, looking out at the world and laughing. He's puzzled in his own mind by all the things that are happening in the world," Nasher says. "No one has ever created works of art like DuBuffet," he adds.

 

A similar thought put Richey and Larsen in the Artcakes business two years ago. During their college days at the University of Dallas, which included a semester at the school's Rome campus, they had enjoyed reproducing modern art — and amusing their friends — with icing on cake.

 

Artcakes first attracted attention in the summer of 1990 with a Van Gogh baked for the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas. Oggetti is often commissioned now for weddings, birthdays, and receptions honoring prominent members of the art community.

 

As their techniques, and tastes, improved, the women began looking for new artistic challenges. Today, Richey and Larsen can both discuss and duplicate color and texture as applied by Van Gogh, Motherwell, Matisse and Renoir. Where the masters worked with oil paints (not so good to eat), they use dinner plates for palettes, dipping their brushes into confectioner's paste colors mixed with melted white chocolate.

 

The artists will first apply a layer of the white chocolate to a cake, as a painter primes his canvas with "gesso," Larsen says. Working from slides of the originals projected on Richey's refrigerator, they etch the main figures into the surface. White chocolate, good for texture, makes a good paint base, while frosting is preferable for reproductions of flat works, such as prints or watercolors. The finished Artcake require 10 to 20 hours of preparation.

 

"Most people's knowledge of painting only comes from the pictures they see in books," says Sybil Novicki, who served Henri Matisse's "Madame Matisse" (oil and tempera on canvas in the original form; lemon zest frosting on buttermilk cake as an Artcake) at her 25th birthday party. "You would normally get this sort of three-dimensional impression if you see the actual painting in a museum. The Artcake reproduces color and texture like the original."

 

The cakes are pricier than art books or prints, too — $100 and up, with some pieces selling for $500 to $600. Richey and Larsen jokingly admit their "patrons" are "rich people who like art" and briefly considered methods such as a screening process that would allow them to charge less for their work.

 

But the partners quickly dropped that idea. They'll bake you an Andy Warhol Artcake but they don't share Warhol's interest in mass-producing his Campbell's Soup cans. "To me, if you mass-produce art, you lose the joy of it," Larsen says.

 

Richey says: "We could hire people to go around with a pastry bag and decorate cakes for us, but then all we would be is managers in suits and pumps."

 

The women, both in their middle-20s, also have regular jobs. Larsen is assistant director of admissions at the University of Dallas and Richey is director of public relations for the Volunteer Center, a United Way agency.

 

They are hoping to eventually make Oggetti a full-time concern, but not yet. As starving artists, they'd just eat up their profits, and Larsen doesn't care for desserts, anyway. They have trademarked "Artcakes," however, and are seeking gallery space.

 

Artcakes are actually just a part of Oggetti's business. Richey and Larsen also create intricate mosaic tables of cut marble tile. They're working on a bathroom floor with a fish theme and have three tables in progress with orders for six more. They believe they've found a real niche here, as well.

 

"We have a hold on this market because no one else is crazy enough to sit and cut one-inch squares for hours at a time. Even the people who do custom marble tables will say, `No way,'" Richey says.

 

With Artcakes and marble tables, Larsen says, "I think we honed in on this narrow vision of imagery. We always liked to do pictures. I really don't think the talent is so exclusive, I think it's endurance and desire."

 

And while Artcakes are more imitative than original, someone with a flair for matching subject with circumstance can have a little fun with them. Edvard Munch's "The Scream," which depicts a man striking the aftershave in-the-bathroom-mirror pose that Macauley Culkin popularized almost a century later in "Home Alone," made an ideal cake for a 50th birthday party.

 

Richey and Larsen studied the dark, swirling brush strokes that set the mood for that painting, which one critic calls "an almost existential portrait of isolation." Such attention to detail can bring startling results, as with Nasher's DuBuffet sculpture.

 

"The presentation of a cake as a work of art was very spiritual — breathtaking," Nasher says. "I've seen cakes that have all kinds of decorations but I haven't seen anything done as well as this to depict a vital and important piece of sculpture."

 

Richey says: It comes back to the expressions on people's faces when you deliver a product to them. We feel proud that we spent the time to make something so precise that it matches a famous work of art. We know people appreciate this is an exact replica of something they could never own.

 

"The more attention you pay to the details in the painting, the more difficult the artcake becomes," she says. "We could reproduce the general form of the painting, but if anyone who knew the piece looked at it, they would say, What a cheap reproduction.' We want artcakes to stand up to the most discerning critic."

 

Richey and Larsen will deliver a cake with a Polaroid photo of the Artcake on top of the box, although they also try to include a postcard print of the original work. "I like it when people look at the Polaroid and think for a moment it's the actual painting. That's a hats-off compliment," Larsen says. "We expect you could stand the cake and the original work side by side and compare all the details most people never look at — but we do."

 

They can chart their progress by the difficulty of the works they've attempted to reproduce on cake.

 

"One of the first cakes we did in college was a Piet Mondrian (of the 1930s "de Stijl" movement). It had a lot of black lines with solid blocks of primary colors. We realized we could do so much more," Larsen says.

 

"Then one of our friends did some prehistoric cave paintings on a cake, and from that point, Artcakes escalated. We got into a tradition of every birthday in this small group of people, making an Artcake. Since then, Julie and have pushed the technique a million miles beyond Duncan Hines frosting. What we're trying to do now are the ones that aren't so easy."

 

The partners have produced an Artcake depicting a Frank Lloyd Wright window, and now Larsen is anxious to create a whole Wright house. Richey would like to copy some of Ansel Adams' black-and-white nature photographs.

 

They've considered what a successful art business could mean for them, perhaps freedom from a 40-hour work week so they can spend 80 hours making Artcakes and mosaic tables.

 

"For us, art is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's all out of devotion to what we make. And we would like to get rich doing it," Larsen says. "But it started the other way around. We were making the cakes and people came to us and said, `Why don't you do this as a business?'"

 

Richey says: "I want to leave something on the earth that's an artistic creation. It almost doesn't matter to me if Oggetti doesn't become a business with a storefront and a number you can call. If it's just me and Laura the artists, working on our tables and our Artcakes, that's OK, too, because I'm still able to create those beautiful pictures I have in my head."