Coffee Wall Art

By Sirena Van Schaik

When I first heard about coffee wall art, my first thoughts were those pictures of steaming espresso cups that you can find just about everywhere. Was this what everyone was talking about or was it something more? Of course, people weren’t talking about those pictures but were in fact talking about Cafegrafia, which is an art form that uses liquid coffee in the process.

This form of art began in 1988 in Costa Rica, when artists began transferring photographs onto a ceramic tile using a process that made the tiles light sensitive. At this point, the coating would react with liquid coffee and would put an image onto the ceramic tile with the coffee.

The original Cafegrafia was flawed in the fact that the process did not allow the finer details of the image to be picked up and artists would have to paint on the remaining details to finish off the piece.

Because of this and because of the limited medium that it was found on, with the exceptions of a few mugs and t-shirts, the Cafegrafia did not really catch on. Of the first attempt at this artwork, only 250 tiles were created and although 225 were sold, it remained a fairly unknown and unpopular art form.

However, over the years, the process was approached in different ways and artists discovered that the light sensitivity process could be created by using the oil from green coffee berries. When artists used this process, they found that images held all of the detail but it was still a flawed art in the fact that it was a long process; generally, it would take about 10 minutes under light to produce a visible image.

At this point, more research went into perfecting the light sensitivity oil and the inventor of Cafegrafia was able to create an oil, using one part of the green coffee berry, that allows an image to be produced in about five seconds.

Although there was a breakthrough on this process, Cafegrafia still didn’t catch on and this could be attributed to many factors. One of these being that the inventor of the process worked on his own and the other factor is the similar process that creates the same coffee colored images.

In the other process, artists are able to use photographic paper and use liquid coffee to create the same effect. This resulted in the production of over 30,000 works of coffee art and they have been distributed around the world.

With a shift in more eco-friendly items, including artwork, many people began expressing an interest in Cafegrafia and the inventor of the art began offering art on coffee filters. This was a new process, very similar to his original works and it has gained in popularity over the years.

Now, more and more people are interested in learning about the Cafegrafia process and learning about the process in itself, which the artist continues to improve.

-Sirena Van Schaik