Artist Profile: Patricia Arribálzaga

That wonderful, fanciful, fantastic food artist, Patricia Arribálzaga, whom I featured a while back was kind enough to respond to my request for a short interview. I love her concise, to-the-point responses; she radiates confidence and certainty about her craft.

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What do you love about your medium?

I love working with edible material, my art is ephemeral, my art object are dematerialized when people eat it

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Describe a piece of artwork that you find superficial or boring.

In my case I find boring the artwork that you can find in every places denoting lack of surprise and personality .

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When did you first call yourself an artist, and why?

When I was around 7 years old when I felt a strong emotion with the result of my drawings and hunger to continue working.

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Describe a piece of artwork and/or an artist that you find consistently inspiring.

The silence of William Turner, the poetry of Fragonard and the colours of Monet

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What is your unique purpose for creating work?

Enjoying expressing myself trough my edible art

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Patricia Arribálzaga

I’m always on the lookout for new types of art that I haven’t featured here, and today I have found a breathtaking pastry artist, the wonderful Patricia Arribálzaga. The exquisite detail and beauty of her work would be phenomenal even if it wasn’t edible, but there it is in all its eatable glory. Her anise cookies first caught my eye with their gentle sculptured look.

Springerle German Anise Christmas Cookies

Now those cookies are amazing, and I can only assume delicious, but they honestly pale in comparison to some of the unbelievable work I found on the Cakes Haute Couture website. For example…

Romantic Toile de Jouy

Just because Arribálzaga’s company likes to show off, their pastry creations use only natural ingredients (no preservatives or additives), absolutely everything they use is edible (including ink and gold leaf), and they decline to use any natural flowers or prefabricated items in their work. All of their decorations are made exclusively from sugar paste, marzipan, or chocolate. You just have to know that before you look through all the amazing pieces on their website, so your mind can be appropriately blown.

As with a few other posts, Arribálzaga owns a company that makes a great deal of this amazing artwork, so I can’t guarantee that these particular pieces are her sole creation. I feel confident though, having read how she trains pastry artists in her unique methods and standards, that her spirit and efforts are behind these pieces.