Painting with (very old) coffee

[velderia]

Is it safe to paint with coffee that expired? Does it have an effect on the archival-ness? Is it possible to sell paintings that are painted with coffee or does it take a certain type of person to be able to sell it?

I was looking at some old coffee that has gone past the expiration date by maybe a month or so. Can it be bad to drink but still be good to paint with? Recycling ftw?

[Aphotic Phoenix]

People do in fact paint with coffee. (I got curious and looked it up). If you want to paint entirely with coffee however you really have to boil it down considerably to get nice darks, and it apparently gets a bit sticky at that point. (One guy reported boiling down 20 pots worth to create one container of coffee paint, but didn't specify exactly how much paint that was.) Supposedly expresso creates darker "paint" than regular coffee as well.

Not really sure about how archival it is. Framing wise I'd treat it like watercolor...i.e. give the painting a bit of breathing room between the glass and paper. Humidity + organic paint = potential hosting of biological life forms. Eww. ~_^

[Grief]

coffee is too acidic to be archival safe.

[VulgarDragon]

Some people paint with food and homemade organic paints...so why not? I heard of a guy who painted on flour tacos! But that is another story...

Tea is often used to stain paper to make it look like old parchment, and I imagine that some people use coffee to the same effect. But like Grief said, it might not last. After like 50 years or so the paper will start turning brittle and crumble.

Edit:
** 20 pots of coffee to make one container of coffee paint? I wonder what would happen if someone drank that container....

[ask maurice]

Who knows, it may have been used as pigment in ancient times. There are quite a few individuals who have experimented successfully with coffee as paint. Here are a few site links:

http://www.asia-art.net/thai_coffee_painting.html (http://www.asia-art.net/thai_coffee_painting.html)

http://www.justcoffeeart.com/ (http://www.justcoffeeart.com/)

An educated guess is however, that in order to use coffee as paint it would be handled as a pigment and first have to be neutralized with a light solution of aqua ammonia or calcium carbonate to a pH of at least 8.5 to prevent acid migration from destroying the support. Then blended with gum (as with watercolor) or with eggs as in tempera (http://www.askmaurice.org/tempera.html) paint.



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