Have Your Cake

Acrylic with Piped Heavy Body Paint on Canvas | 42×58 inches | 2025 | Delicacies Series

On the morning of her fiftieth birthday, the artist picked up a palette knife and a tube of heavy body paint — and piped it onto a canvas like icing onto a cake.

Have Your Cake is many things simultaneously. It is a painting of a cake. It is a cake that is a painting. It is a birthday self-portrait without a face. It is a meditation on time, on pleasure, on the audacity of still being here, still making things, still finding joy in the extravagant and the absurd and the delicious. It is, in the most literal sense possible, having your cake and eating it too.

The surface is extraordinary — thick ropes of piped white and pink paint curl and tumble across the canvas exactly as buttercream curls and tumbles from a piping bag, because that is precisely what this is. Each red rose is a sculptural object, dimensional and immediate, catching light and shadow the way real icing roses do on a real birthday cake. The green candles stand at angles of cheerful irreverence. Behind and beneath it all, the background erupts in hot pink, yellow and black — expressionistic, explosive, the energy of a party in full swing, a life lived at full volume.

This is not a still life. It is a declaration.

Fifty years. And what does the artist make to mark the occasion? Not a self-portrait in the conventional sense. Not a landscape or a meditation. A cake. The most celebratory, most abundant, most gloriously unnecessary object in human culture — the thing we make not because we need it but because we want it, because life deserves to be marked with something sweet and excessive and beautiful and completely over the top.

The title completes the thought that the painting begins. Have Your Cake. The full proverb withheld, the second half implied, the decision already made. Yes. Both. All of it. Why not? Why ever not?

Part of the Delicacies series, Have Your Cake is its emotional and biographical centre — the painting that reveals why food matters as subject matter, why pleasure deserves serious artistic attention, why the table is as worthy a subject as the mountain or the sea. Because this is where we celebrate. This is where we mark time. This is where we say — I am still here, and I am glad, and here is a cake to prove it.

✦ Original, one-of-a-kind painting ✦ Acrylic with piped heavy body paint on canvas ✦ 42 × 58 inches ✦ Created on the artist's 50th birthday, 2025 ✦ Part of the Delicacies series ✦ Free worldwide shipping — ships rolled in a tube

Stretched Canvas Delivery For collectors who prefer to receive this work pre-stretched and ready to hang, please note that due to its exceptional scale, oversized freight shipping costs are at the client's expense. I'm happy to provide a freight quote tailored to your location — simply contact me before purchasing. Alternatively, your preferred art handler or framer can stretch the canvas locally upon arrival.

Fifty years. One canvas. All the icing.