Meet The Artist Who Paints With Beer

Karen Eland always had a lot of interests.

“I was never one of those kids who always knew what they wanted to do,” said Eland in a telephone interview. “I was involved in about 14 different things. I was big into diving, but when I was 15, I realized I needed to do something that would eventually earn me a living.”

“I liked painting and I was decent at it, so I took an art class,” said Eland. “The class was at a small-town art store, but it taught me drawing skills and how to work with watercolor.” Even at the tender age of 15 and with just one art class on her palette, Eland started earning money painting portraits and over the years, painting became her full-time vocation.

It Started With Coffee

Eland often painted at a coffee shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was living at the time. “I was working on a watercolor at a friend’s coffee shop. I was bored,” said Eland. “I was just staring into space when I watched the espresso coming out of the machine. And I wondered if I could paint with it. Coffee is water based, so I thought it might be like painting watercolor.”

The experiment with coffee worked and Eland soon found herself painting all sorts of images using coffee—from reproductions of famous works of art with coffee whimsically added, to meta paintings of latte art—and made a name for herself using that unique medium.

A New City, A New Medium

In 2008, Eland moved to Bend, Oregon. “I do enjoy trying something new,” said Eland when asked if she likes beer. “So some friends and I started a group we called ‘Tradition’ where we would try a new brewery every Thursday.”

“In Bend, there are breweries everywhere, so eventually I thought I’d try painting with beer. It was simple. I got some dark beer and I dunked my paint brush in it,” said Eland, rather casually. Anybody who has ever tried to follow along with an episode of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting knows that painting is a lot easier than it looks, so there is a lot more to it than dunking a paint brush into beer. But Eland insists painting with beer is just like painting with watercolor. “It’s a lot of layering. And you use watercolor paper, which is absorbent.”

Eland paints in a realistic style and the beer on paper gives her work a sepia-like tone. She says she experimented with using beers with berries in them, hoping the color might transfer to the paper, but those efforts proved unfruitful.

Eland paints beer-related items—beers, brewery logos, brewers and brewery founders—but also paints landscapes and reproductions of other famous works of art. Breweries often commission her paintings and her work can be found on many brewery walls. But commissions only comprise between 30% and 40% of her work. The rest are images Eland is inspired to paint on her own.

“People like scenic paintings,” said Eland. “But I like doing paintings of the science of beer. I’ve painted beer ingredients, or illustrations of chemical processes and patent drawings from the early development of beer.”

One of the largest beer paintings Eland has been commissioned to produce was a diptych for the Brewers Association, the trade association representing America’s small and independent breweries. Each half of the diptych is about 4 feet by 5 feet, the first depicting a historic brewhouse scene which is juxtaposed against the second half, depicting a modern one.

Order At The Bar—Or The Website

For commissioned paintings, Eland is sometimes asked to use a specific beer. As long as the beer is dark, she is happy to oblige, always taking a sip of inspiration first. Otherwise, enjoying trying new beers means Eland seeks inspiration from any number of new beers available in Bend. But she does have some local favorites.

One early pioneer in the Bend craft beer scene was Deschutes Brewery, which has grown to be one of the largest craft breweries in America. As a staple in the local beer scene, Deschutes’s pitch-black Black Butte Porter has been used to created many of Eland’s works. Similarly, Bend’s Worthy Brewing makes vanilla-flavored Lights Out Stout, which tastes as good as it paints.

After completing the painting, Eland applies a spray varnish. With matting and framing behind glass, there is no aroma and the image is resistant to fading. Eland still has images from when she first started painting with beer in 2008 and those have yet to fade.

Prints of Eland’s paintings can be purchased, and custom works can be commission, via Eland’s website.