You probably love drinking them, maybe even roasting them but have you ever made art with them?
From detailed paintings of landscapes in different shades of brown to stencilled coffee cup lattes, coffee beans are a versatile medium.
This year, two artists stood out – Hong Yi for her interesting coffee cup ring paintings and Arkadi Kim for breaking the world record for the longest coffee bean mosaic.
Japanese based artist, Hong Yi created a painting of the singer Jay Chou using the bottom of her coffee cup. It seems that Yi embraced the coffee ring stain that most of us hate. Her technique involved dipping the bottom of her cup in coffee and then creating hundreds of rings on her canvas to create intricate works of art.
Also this year, Russian artist Arkadi Kim, broke the world record for the largest coffee bean mosaic which was created and displayed in Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Moscow for one month over the summer.
The mural, which was appropriately titled ‘Awakening’ took approximately one million coffee beans to make and measured almost 30 square metres. The different colours were created by roasting the coffee beans for different amounts of time – now that’s an example of painstaking dedication!
Impressively, the large scale coffee bean masterpiece took Kim and his team of five assistants only two weeks to complete and involved gluing different shades of coffee beans, one at a time onto a large board.
The finished result was a girl’s face with a cup of coffee and lots of swirly lines resembling the wonderful aroma of coffee – although, we think the girl could have looked a bit more cheerful.
To complete the exhibition, a temporary coffee shop equipped with good quality coffee machines and some comfy seats was set up in the park so visitors could get the full coffee bean experience.