Frappuccino Variations

A Modern Still Life for an Absurd Era

Still life has always been a record of its time—fruit bowls, wine goblets, lace, porcelain.
Objects that once carried status, comfort, luxury, or domestic pride.

Today?
It’s the branded drink in a disposable cup.

The Frappuccino—or Boba cup, or McDonald’s iced coffee—became the everyday luxury object of the last two decades. A $6 identity token. A comfort ritual to soothe the sugar addiction. Something people felt they needed to hold, photograph, and be seen with or get comfort from. A tiny piece of status theatre and panacea, mass-produced and everywhere.

These paintings look at that phenomenon without judging it.
Not nostalgic for the past, not cynical about the present.
Just asking: What does a “still life” look like now?

A Disposable Object, Painted Like It Matters

Each cup is painted with heavy impasto—thick, sculptural, unruly texture that refuses the flatness of the digital world. In an age where everything is smooth and screen-ready, the surface here is cracked, raised, and unpredictable. Light shifts across it. The piece behaves differently depending on where you stand.

The technique “glorifies” a throwaway object, the same way painters once elevated fruit or silverware. And that tension—between seriousness and ridiculousness — is part of the point. The subject is absurd, but the treatment is sincere.

The result: a familiar object becomes unfamiliar, worth a second look.
A small contemporary ritual becomes something almost mythic.

Why Four?

The series comes in four variations—a stable grid, nodding to Pop Art’s serial logic. But where Pop used repetition to flatten an image, these multiples do the opposite.

Tone, mood, temperature, and emotional dynamics shift dramatically from piece to piece:

• A neon, late-night version
• An acidic, chaotic one
• A refined, archival cream-and-gold version
• A warm, baroque, almost decadent interpretation

The subject stays the same, but its identity drifts, the way people shift depending on context, lighting, or mood. It’s repetition with humanity still intact.

A Contemporary Still Life

I’m not painting these as kitsch or parody. The seriousness isn’t ironic—it’s observational. A record of what “everyday luxury” looks like now.

These paintings sit firmly in today’s world—not as kitsch, not as parody, but as a document of now. The branded drink has become our era’s still-life object: comforting, disposable, status-driven, and quietly absurd.

Painting it in thick texture breaks the digital norm.
Multiplying it reveals the emotional instability behind the everyday ritual.
And treating it seriously, without cynicism, lets the humor stay alive without becoming a joke.

A cup of blended sugar shouldn’t hold this much meaning—but here we are.