Maurice Bennett: The Toastman

For my media arts class, I've stumbled on a webpage of a very interesting artist known as Maurice Bennett. He's said to be one of the most famous artists of New Zealand and for a very good reason. Bennett is best known for making art made out of toast. Yes, toast. Check out his artwork of our former President Barry.

The key to Bennett's impressive toast art is the alignment of the toast. Not only does he need to align the different slices to get the shape of his art, but the toast needs to different colors to get the shading, and color for recognizability. The way the toast is neatly aligned can also be an applicant for the aesthetic usability effect. As an artist, you want your work to look aesthetically pleasing and give off a positive attitude that'll make the viewers be able to tolerate and accept your work. Aesthetic usability can help develop positive relations and catalyze your creative thinking.

This man here, is Gareth Edwards, one of the greatest rugby players of all time.

How is it up close, Bennett's most well-known works look like a ton of toast laid out together but from afar, they actually look less like toast and more like very detailed pixelated art? The key to Bennett's amazing toast art is with the technique of closure which helps perceive a set of individual elements as a single recognizable pattern.

Here's a more simple simple one, which Bennett (The shorter man standing to the right of his artwork) used to commemorate Beervana. As you can see, due to the closure, the individual slices of toast come together to make one big picture.

Bennett's work has somewhat of an exposure effect that helps expose stimuli and increase likelihood and popularity on the product. Take for example, his work of the Mona Lisa holding an ice cream cone (which is featured in a mall in Hong Kong)

The exposure effect at it's finest. Taking one of the most classical and famous portraits in the history of the universe and adding a cute twist to it with Lisa holding a tasty strawberry ice cream cone that obviously didn't exist during Da Vinci's lifetime. It also seems to rely on the classic "nudge" technique, which is a method for predicting behavior without restricting and significantly changing incentives. Looking at this picture won't change your life but maybe just looking at it might tempt you to get some ice cream right about now...

Speaking of the nudge method, the fact that Maurice Bennett makes his artwork out of toast might also encourage you to eat more toast.

To end things off, here's my favorite work of Bennett's which isn't even toast art. It's 5040 M&Ms coming together to make a portrait of the rapper Eminem.