Food For Thought

If you think the landscapes of Carl Warner look good enough to eat, then you’re not far from the truth. Oliver Atwell tours an edible wonderland.

- Oliver Atwell

There are many times in our lives when we look at an innocuous object and, often to our amusement, we see something else. How many times have you looked at the front of a car and seen the bumper, grille and headlights arrange themselves into a smiling face? How many times have you looked to the sky and seen clouds morph into recognisable objects right in front of your eyes? It’s a very common thing for people to do. We’re hardwired to find patterns in disorder.

However, one man has made a career out of creating images that utilise this very idea. In the mind of Carl Warner, a simple cauliflower can become a frosted forest tree and a delicious box of chocolate fingers can become railway sleepers.

Looking through Carl’s work, it’s difficult not to be struck by the wealth of imagination on display. Every landscape is painstakingly conceived and executed. While he uses other materials as well, it’s his foods capes that have garnered Carl global attention. His work has been seen all over the world, on a variety of TV shows and in a host of publications. Food, like numbers, is something of a universal language.

Carl is someone who has always loved the ‘visual’. As a child growing up in Kent, he would spend hours sketching in his room and absorbing the works of Salvador Dali, Patrick Woodroffe and the record-sleeve artist Roger Dean. Art college followed and soon Carl began to realise that his talents were better served by photography. Later, he began to explore both landscape photography and still-life imagery – two disciplines that, as you can see, have married beautifully in the work we see now.

The right ingredients