No crust but a lot of dough: Painting of Uncrustables sandwich sells for almost $5K

Move over Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans, a painting of an Uncrustables sandwich is the latest piece of art inspired by food.

Tallahassee artist Noah Verrier was inspired by a box of Uncrustables PB&J sandwiches he bought at Publix.

The New York Times said that after unwrapping the snack, sunlight highlighted a drop of strawberry jelly and he was inspired to capture the moment in oil paint.

After two days of painting, Verrier had a masterpiece he put up for auction, selling it online for $4,999 over the weekend.

The childhood lunch box staple isn’t the first food-inspired artistic creation Verrier painted.

Verrier has bushed cheesesteaks, sodas and dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets onto canvas, usually eating the food before he captures it for the ages.

After a painting is complete, he posts the image on social media.

One of the bidders on eBay was Ryan Morgan, a political consultant in Arlington, Virginia, who told the Times, " I think this is the rare painting that both me and my 2-year-old can appreciate.”

But Morgan, despite bidding $4,050, didn’t win. An unidentified bidder paid nearly $5,000, or the cost of about 525 boxes of Uncrustables at Walmart.

This isn’t the first time that Verrier’s art has caught the eye of people willing to pay. Several fast food chains such as Popeyes and Wendy’s have asked for paintings of their menu items. Commissions like those, the artist said, now cost “in the tens of thousands of dollars.”

He noted that the Uncrustable wasn’t a commission. He has painted them before because his four kids eat them frequently.

Verrier went to school at Florida State University where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree. His professors there introduced him to classical artists who painted still-lifes of flowers or cheese and fruit. He translated the styles to Goldfish and Grey Goose, he told the Times.

He paints them in an alla prima technique used by Impressionists by layering wet paint.

Verrier also has a master of fine arts from the same university and taught there until 2017 when he left education to paint full-time.

Art historian and retired Princeton professor Leonard Barkan, called art like Verrier creates, “The sweet space, so to speak, is in the relation ... between the beautiful and the real. Food in art is, for me, let’s call it, the realest real,” the CBC reported.

“The technique is great because it started so long ago and, like, this is something that we carry on today,” Verrier told the CBC. “But maybe we should think about what’s contemporary, what’s up today — not just painting, like, oysters and lemons like [French artist Édouard] Manet did a hundred years ago.”

Pamela Michelle Johnson also paints common foods, along with the trash left behind. She told the CBC, “Food’s kind of been painted throughout American history, and I kind of was thinking about, you know, a lot of the fruit bowls and whatnot didn’t really relate to our mainstream culture.”

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