Alice Straker

What Makes Alice Straker's Work Distinctive

Straker paints food the way it deserves to be painted — as something worth looking at closely, with the same attention a portraitist gives a face. Her subjects are simple and specific: sardines lined up on a vivid orange ground, langoustines arranged on yellow, prawns catching the light against deep berry red. The paint is applied thickly, building up texture that gives each piece a sculptural, almost three-dimensional presence on the wall. Colour contrasts do the heavy lifting — warm yellows against cool blues, burnt orange against cream — creating images that are immediately recognisable across a room.

Her background in Art History shows in the compositional choices. These are not casual food illustrations — they are carefully structured paintings where the placement of each element is deliberate, the negative space considered, the palette tightly controlled. The result feels both playful and serious, which is a difficult balance to achieve and one that makes the work age well. For more food-themed artwork, see our kitchen art prints collection, and for other artists working in a similar contemporary idiom, browse our contemporary art prints.

Choosing the Right Format

The thick, textured quality of Straker's oil paintings translates differently across formats, and both have their strengths. Fine art paper prints in A3, 50x70cm, 70x100cm, and A0 capture the colour fidelity precisely — every brushstroke visible, every colour transition sharp and controlled. Framing in oak, black, or walnut brown all work well, though black frames create the strongest contrast with her saturated backgrounds and help contain the energy of the colour. Oak frames suit the warmer, yellow-toned pieces. Canvas prints in 30x40cm, 50x70cm, and 70x100cm add a tactile surface texture that echoes the physical quality of the original oil paintings — a particularly good match for this artist, whose work is fundamentally about the materiality of paint. An optional floating frame gives canvas prints a clean gallery finish with a visible shadow gap.

Pairing Alice Straker Prints

Straker's food paintings are natural fits for kitchens and dining rooms, but their colour intensity also works in living spaces, studies, and hallways where a burst of warmth is welcome. Group two or three pieces with matching frames for a dedicated food art wall — sardines beside langoustines, for example, creates a cohesive series with visual rhythm. Her prints pair well with other food and drink art from our collection, or with Retrodrome's Bauhaus-inspired coffee and cocktail prints for a kitchen gallery that mixes figurative warmth with graphic confidence. Keep the framing consistent and the spacing even — the saturated colours do the rest.

All prints are produced in our Berlin studio using archival pigment inks rated for 100+ years.