Toast Art

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About

Toast Art refers to the practice of printing a stencil design or pattern on sliced bread by toasting it to varying shades of brown with a blow torch.

Origin

One of the first known pieces of toast art was a rendition of The Mona Lisa (shown below) created by Japanese artist Tadahiko Ogawa^[1] in 1983. The work was completed in two weeks using 63 slices of bread.^[2]

Spread

In 1999, Swedish artists Ingrid Falk and Gustavo Aguerre used 3,053 pieces of bread to produce a collage of a toaster for their work The Toaster in Milan, Italy. The work was redone in December 2000 for the First International Art Biennial in Buenos Aires, Argentina, using 2,500 slices of toast (shown below, left), which was subsequently acquired by the Modern Art Museum of Buenos Aires as part of their permanent collection. Sometime prior to May 2004^[3], another toast art tribute to Mona Lisa in the style of pixel art (shown below, right) was put on display at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium in Orlando, Florida.

In April 2005, Andrew Eason uploaded one of the first toast art tutorials to Flickr^[9] using a series of aluminum foil stencils. In March 2006, a third Mona Lisa was made out of 150 toast slices by English artist Emma Green.^[8] The same year, artist Lennie Payne created the website Toast2Art^[5] to show off his toast works (shown below), earning a feature on the BBC’s Inside Out- London^[7] segment in October.

In 2007, New Zealand-based artist Maurice Bennett^[10] began sharing his toast-based work, for which he earned the nickname "The Toastman," online. His work, along with pieces by other artists, was featured on Neatorama^[11], Make^[12], Trendhunter^[13] and eBaum's World^[14] throughout 2007 and 2008. Over the next several years, additional compilations of toast art images were shared on The Chive^[15], CNN^[16], Rocket24^[17], BuzzFeed^[18] and Kotaku.^[19]

Notable Examples

The Bread Art Project

In 2011, the Grain Foods Foundation launched The Bread Art Project^[20], allowing people to virtually create works of art on slices of bread. Participants can choose the type of bread, using brushes to "toast" it. Alternatively, they can upload a photo to be turned into a work of toast art. Between April 1st and June 30th of that year, the site donated $1 from every piece of toast art created to Share Our Strength, a organization dedicated to ending child hunger.^[21] By the end of the campaign, the site raised $23,100 for the charity.

Laser Engraved Toasts

On January 20th, 2014, an anonymous 4chan^[22] user posted a thread on the /gd/ (graphic design) board in which he offered to custom print black-and-white images on individual slices of bread with a laser engraver and ship them for free within the United States. Over the course of the following week, the original poster (OP) completed the engraving of more than a dozen of user-requested images, including several homages to well-known internet memes like Breadfriend, Trollface, Dick Butt, Ayy Lamo, Mega Milk and That Feel (from top left, clockwise). On January 27th, a compilation of notable toast prints from the original thread was submitted to the /r/4chan subreddit, where it gained over 8,300 up votes and 300 comments in the first 24 hours, and the story was subsequently picked up by The Daily Dot^[24] later that same day.