July 25th, 2019: Banana Art

Have you ever gotten into a creative hobby like painting or sculpture and had it take over your house, your life.
Not good enough to sell, your friends have plenty, thank you, and the Salvation Army locks the door when they see you coming.
If you carved bananas you wouldn’t have that problem because you can take a picture then eat them.
When you get full don't worry, they will turn into brown poop without you.



There are a couple people on the net who prolifically produce sculptures from banana, and one of them is Keisuke Yamada.

Based in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, Yamada spends his days as an electrician and his spare time as a banana sculptor. (He also occasionally teaches classes on fruit carving.) Over email, Yamada explains that he started sculpting bananas in 2011. Bored, he peeled a banana, and had an idea. What would happen if he carved a face into it?

From there, Yamada—noting that the Internet loved his creations—began sculpting much more than just faces. “You can carve human beings, animals, whatever,” he says, adding that he often finds inspirations in people’s movements and favorite movie characters. The texture of the bananas makes some of these creatures, such as snakes, appear even more sinister as they slither out of the peel. Others, such as his elephants and horses, have an astoundingly life-like quality.

It takes Yamada about an hour to make one banana sculpture, and on a record banana-carving day, he made nine works in 15 hours. His tools are everyday household items: a toothpick and a spoon.

Yamada admits that he’s gotten tired of the taste of bananas over the years, and that he “ate too much and gained weight.” Nevertheless, he still loves bananas and the unlikely faces and places he can carve out of them.

If it turns out you're a slow carver or just fed up with bananas you can use Ivory like these.



link

As a rule, ars longa, vita brevis, but in this case ars brevis.

Maybe that will result in vita longa, that would be a fair trade. ;)