A painter eats his inspiration

PHILADELPHIA - How does a guy get to the point where he can't stop creating paintings of cheese?

In the case of Mike Geno, a 41-year-old artist and food fanatic here, it's instructive to rewind to a phase in his life when he created his first painting of steak.

That was more than a decade ago, when he was a graduate student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the phrase "starving artist" served as a distressingly apt description of his life.

One day, Mr. Geno said, he was sitting in his studio, "very poor and hungry," when a friend dropped by.

"I said, 'I should just do a big juicy steak painting - something you want to bite your teeth into,'" he recalled the other day at his apartment, where the walls are covered with oil paintings of jelly doughnuts, hot dogs, croissants, slices of pancetta, pieces of sushi, curiously erotic whorls of bacon and many, many wedges of cheese.

"So the next day I went out and bought one," he said. I chose porterhouse because I thought that was the most quintessential steak."

He kept the porterhouse cool by placing it in the path of an air-conditioner, and he painted its portrait quickly - in less than four hours.

"I couldn't afford not to eat it," he said. "That's why I rushed. I had it for dinner that night and it was wonderful."

Later, among his teachers and fellow students, he realized that his culinary impulse had paid off: everyone was swooning over that steak painting.

"It just seemed to click," he said.

After that breakthrough, Mr. Geno, who sells most of his paintings online (for $300 to $900), developed something of a mission statement.

"I only paint things that I find attractive and appetizing," he said. "I like to translate what I find the most seductive about my subject. And cheese, it turns out, is the absolute perfect match for the way I paint. I get hungry looking at cheese."

Visitors to his studio can't help having a similar response, seeing as how one wall is practically fragrant with beckoning portraits of Gouda, Manchego, Morbier, Shropshire Blue, Cheddar and mimolette.

Tenaya Darlington, 40, who blogs about cheese under the moniker Madame Fromage, said, "His paintings are seductions. They make me want to reach out with a hunk of baguette and swipe the paint right off the canvas."

Ms. Darlington wound up becoming Mr. Geno's cheese mentor, and together they set out to explore cheeses from around the world.

Now on Friday mornings they often meet for curd-driven tours of Philadelphia shops, she said, "to gaze in the windows and sample anything that's new."

She added, "I feel Mike approaches cheese almost like a cheesemaker himself, which is to say, he wants to bring out the beauty of the milk. His paintings capture every eye, every pudgy bulge, every nub on the rind."

Other food products do entice him. He recently converted a bacon still life into a shower curtain that he uses.

But like Picasso with the color blue, Monet with haystacks or Wayne Thiebaud with his vast array of cakes, Mr. Geno just keeps going back to the aromatic source of his obsession.

"I've learned one thing," he said. "I'm never going to run out of cheese."

The New York Times