The images on the screen you’re reading this article on at this very moment are made up of pixels, and that goes for any other digitally rendered image you’ve viewed on your laptop or phone. Candice CMC is an pixel artist of sorts, but instead of a pain application, her pixels are bigger, and they’re actually donuts.
Her process is as follows: She photographs donuts individually, evaluates their colors, and then uses them to create large-scale portraits of figures like Marilyn Monroe, Alfred E. Neuman, Spock, and others. Like most small-scale pixel art, it gets easier to tell what’s being represented when you’re farther away, but the good news is that when you’re up close, you’re looking at a wall of donuts.
Here’s a fun math exercise: Let’s figure out how many calories are in these donut arrangements, putting aside for a second the fact that it’s just an arrangement of donut photos and not a tiling of donuts that ever existed in one place. In the portrait of Van Gogh below, the frame is 22 donuts wide by 28 donuts tall, meaning there are 616 donuts. A quick Google search tells us that 250 calories is a fair estimation for a glazed donut, so multiply that out and in total, we have 154,000 calories, or 77 days worth, assuming a 2,000 calorie, donut-only diet.
The lesson we’ve learned through this: Instead of trying to eat that many donuts, let’s just appreciate what Candice CMC can do with them visually instead, with a few of her works below, and more here. If you’re so inclined to buy one of these works for yourself, you can do so here, but be aware that this is high art we’re talking about, so you’ll be paying high art prices to spice up that living room wall.
Featured image: Ardt Gallery
