Featured Artist Christina Peters

Christina Peters creates beautifully patterned kaleidoscope images using food photography. See more of her fascinating art by visiting her website.

 

 

I started taking pictures when I was eight years old with my father’s Minolta XT100 in the eighties. When I would get the pictures back from the lab, I was always so disappointed. They didn’t look like the images I had in my head of what I remembered shooting. This started my obsession with figuring out how to get that image in my head onto a photographic image.

 

 

I went to college and got a couple of degrees in photography along the way. It was always in the back of my mind that I couldn’t do “fine art” because that meant being a starving artist, so I figured I had to become a commercial photographer. I was still obsessing over mastering my camera and lighting.

 

 

While I was experimenting in school, one of the things I did was take large format transparency sheet film, shoot four copies of my subject, then flip and rotate each of the 4×5 sheets and put those together. Images would be mirrored and create complete abstract shapes and designs.

 

 

That was when I discovered my love of taking everyday objects and making a beautiful pattern out of them.

 

 

My commercial photography career took me to the food world. In 2003, I decided to focus only on photographing food. I did projects with ad agencies and design firms for advertising food brands. This is when I started making photographic patterns out of food for my personal projects.

 

 

My commercial work was often photographing completely fabricated food–fast food. I was getting farther away from why I got into shooting food in the first place. My personal work became a way for me to get back to photographing real food again, where the word “natural” actually meant something that wasn’t processed and wasn’t an advertising gimmick.

 

 

My Kaleidoscope of Food series is celebrating what nature has given us from the earth and from the oceans. The final images have been constructed from parts of food images that I have taken. I take these parts, and use Photoshop to create these kaleidoscopes by repeating squares, triangles and polygons.

 

 

Many of the images are of produce. We have such wonderful farmer’s markets here in Los Angeles. My inspiration is just seeing a farmer’s beautiful bounty on his table that week at the market.

 

 

I first start out by photographing a traditional still life of my treasures from the market. Then, after working on those images, I break them down and turn them into the patterns you see here. When starting a kaleidoscope, I have no idea of the direction the image will go. I might redo it several times as I begin to see what patterns develop.

 

 

I stopped shooting fast food several years ago for my commercial work, and now I only work with brands and companies that have a similar food philosophy as my own. With my fine art, I’ve worked with several art consultants over the years placing my kaleidoscope images into healthcare facilities.

 

Artist Christina Peters invites you to follow her on Instagram.

 

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