Laurie Flood spends her time outside of work painting lattes, blueberries and avocados. But she wasn’t always so enamored by food.
A picky eater as a kid, Flood became a vegetarian at age 10 and mostly ate cheese, bread and other carbs. “I actually didn’t like to eat food for a while because it was so hard,” to find something, she says. In the mid-1990s, the mainstream meatless revolution was decades away. During college is when she discovered food as a joy, watching cooking shows and browsing the cookbook aisles at Barnes & Noble.
With an undergrad degree in painting, and a master’s in art history from American University, the Herndon resident started KitchArt last fall. Her full-time job in the accounting department of Custom Ink and the paint-and-sip classes she leads at Pinot’s Palette in Merrifield weren’t enough of an artistic outlet. But with KitchArt, Flood says, she can “keep my feet in the art world.”
Her new Esty shop features lush, up-close images of chocolate cake and sliced-open oranges and pints of strawberries in saturated oil colors on canvas.
She takes commissions, too, like commemorating a wedding cake, or even, a piece of meat. Her friend asked her for a painting of steak with green beans and a glass of wine. “Steak was pretty hard just because it’s not something I looked at [on] a regular basis.” Onions? Easier. // etsy.com/shop/KitchArtVA
