Turning up for dinner to find a plate of blue ravioli or blue aoili on their salad comes with the territory for Nicola Bennett’s family.
Bennett went through a stage of using blue spirulina powder to turn food blue. Why? Because there are not many blue savoury foods.
"You can’t really taste the blue spirulina but it makes this really good colour. They’d be like ‘what the hell is this?’ So I love all that kind of stuff, playing about with colour and flavour."
These experiments drive Bennett’s art.
"There's this kind of joy in the making with cooking and painting, which people talk about a lot. This kind of sensory experience. And whether you're painting or cooking, for me it's so similar. You're smelling the paint and you've got this real tactile relationship with your materials. And then there's this kind of transformation, which I think they both share in that you've got this blank canvas and some paints and your job is to try and create something out of that. And in the kitchen you've just got all these ingredients. By themselves they're not very exciting but once you start to combine them and layer them and turn them into something, then they become exciting.
"And so I'd say I'm pretty addicted to that transformation; just the idea that you can make something of nothing."
She has taken that concept a step further, collaborating with a chef where they have given each other colour challenges to create with. She has also done dinner parties inspired by her paintings hung around the room.
"I talk about the paintings and the food. And so they can have a sensory experience where they can look at colour and different aspects while they're enjoying flavour."
These kinds of experimental crossovers drive her creativity.
"I love this stuff. I want the eyes to see what the mouth feels, I suppose, or tastes. And so it's this constant kind of crossover of senses. And I want my eyes to feel as excited about colour as my mouth does about flavour .
"You know, I want to feel excited about the painting. So I need it to give me that. I need it to remind me of the way I felt about flavour . "
But it has taken some time to find her groove with art even though she did her fine arts degree when she was 20. Back then she was into printmaking and sculpture. She had always been creative and an art teacher at school encouraged that in Bennett, who was dyslexic.
"So she changed a lot for me because she just believed in me and I needed that as a teenager. So it was definitely the thing that has come the most easily to me. And the thing that really lights me up, I suppose, and I think that as well as food, the two have just been very strong points in my life my whole time."
Her food journey began thanks to her mother who was an "amazing" cook and showed her that it was a way of making people happy.
"Then I suppose it just became not enough, the cooking, because you cook and you eat and it's gone and it's just this cycle.
She decided she needed something more tangible, so 17 years ago enrolled to do her master’s degree which required her to delve into what her art was about.
"And it was always about food. I talked a lot about the haptic response and so letting the senses swap over. So when people are blind, of course, they have a really heightened sense of touch and hearing. And I wanted that idea of kind of heightening our senses without losing one of them, but just like really paying attention to our senses."
From there she got into the sounds of cooking so did a lot of drawing in the kitchen and thinking about what does the sound of sizzling look like as a mark. She also did a lot of tactile drawing — touching the object and then making a mark.
"So I was really experiencing ingredients from a different sense, not just by looking at them, by touching them and smelling them, just really trying to make those ingredients come to life and looking at them as though they've got a personality."
The journey was "life-changing" for Bennett as she discovered her love for abstract painting during an exercise at art school that required her to complete a piece of art as her "alter ego".
"I knew straight away I wanted to be this abstract painter."
"Looking back, those paintings were terrible, but they served a purpose, you know, because I then was like, I can do this."
Despite many people telling her there were only a chosen few who could make it as a full-time painter, she decided she was going to do it. So she learned everything she could about being an artist and business person and got started. That was about nine years ago.
She also discovered the power of social media. While she was using Instagram as a visual diary, she was soon approached by people keen to buy her work.
"It started to kind of gain a bit of momentum. And then all my international sales in the last three years have come from Instagram. So I've started to kind of take it a bit more seriously and try and build my brand through there."
Her work was picked up by Artis Gallery in Auckland about 18 months ago, after they saw her work at a group show, and she had her first solo show at the gallery last year.
2024 was a big year for Bennett as she also moved from Rotorua where her family had lived for more than 20 years to Alexandra.
With a 15-year-old daughter unhappy at school, Bennett, who also has a 17-year-old son, had this "crazy idea" they could move to Wanaka but given the changes the town had undergone in recent times, her husband suggested Alexandra instead.
She especially enjoys that it has allowed her to have a big studio space. The large space above a restaurant allows her to hang up to 11 paintings at once. She brings her dog in each day and has a nice comfy sofa for a break.
"It’s kind of like my second home. So it's got like big apex kind of barn shape and windows at the very top. And so in winter, the light is just exceptional here.
"I didn't realise how amazing the light is in the South Island in winter."
Added to that is the easy access to food producers. She has so far visited growers of nuts, saffron, apricots and berries.
"The food growers down here are just totally amazing, so that's why I love to go and actually visit food growers and hear all their passion for their ingredients, and then I can kind of mix that with my own passion for the ingredient, and then the paintings just have a lot more energy because I've got so much that I want to say."
Painting what is in season is important to her and often means she is working with similar ingredients each year so she seeks out different ways to cook the ingredient.
" I want it to kind of surprise me and make me kind of fall in love with it all over again. So trying to take away the familiarity of it, you know, because familiarity, of course, can kill excitement and passion.
"We have this kind of journey of getting to know one another. And when I feel like that about an ingredient, where I'm just like wowed by it, then I make much more powerful work."
"I generally try and surround myself by flavour and food all the time in my studio and kitchen. Because it's what I love and it keeps the drive and the push for the painting."
One of her works for the art fair is based on the wild asparagus she foraged.
"I never got to experience that in the North Island. And so for two months I was picking wild asparagus and cooking all these really cool things with it. If I can, the best process is experience the ingredient, then cook, then draw, then paint."
Bennett likes to have multiple works on the go so she can move from one to another if one gets tricky.
"Some paintings can actually take months ... I don't plan them. They have to evolve naturally. And sometimes I just don't know how to resolve them. And I just will be looking at them bloody forever. They're so frustrating. And then eventually I'll go, ‘oh, it needs that’. But I don't know when that time's going to be."
It is just part of the process that makes painting so addictive for Bennett.
"It’s like a puzzle. You just need to be super patient and just keep showing up. You know you don’t wait for inspiration, you just have to keep showing up and doing the work."
Bennett has also found her works are increasing in size. Her normal size of work was 180cm by 210cm but now her largest is 4.5m by 190cm.
"These giant grapes that look like plums that they grow down here. So it could stay black and white or it might get a bit of colour.
"I love working big. I just love the challenge of it."
Her small works, called "The Cookbook Series" as they were a similar size, required quite different skills.
"When I'm working big, I'm doing more big gestural moves. I love that the painting takes up my entire field of vision. You do something and then you walk really far back to see if it works with the whole painting. And then you get close again. It's much more kind of physical ."
In between paintings, Bennett has been developing an online abstract painting course, which is about to be launched in June. It combines her love of painting with her experience as a specialist art teacher in primary and secondary schools, as well as in art retreats and private lessons.
"It'll take a bit of pressure off trying to paint my heart out, you know."
TO SEE:
Aotearoa Art Fair in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, May 1-4.
