BELLEFONTE — Craig Peterson admits he’s not a big fan of coffee. He drinks only one of the many cups he brews a day. The rest is turned into an art medium, used to stain the backgrounds of his outdoors-inspired watercolor paintings and ink drawings.
Peterson will be one of 70 vendors at the Bellefonte Arts and Crafts Fair on Aug. 11 and 12 at Talleyrand Park. He is returning for his second year to the fair, after winning Best New Artist last year, his first appearance at the festival. He is no newcomer to the art fair scene, though, having joined the festival circuit five years ago, around the same time he started to sell his popular “coffee artwork.”
Many artists have painted with coffee, using the coffee as a type of watercolor paint. Not Peterson.
“I never really did it because it’s something that’s been done by a lot of people,” he says. “Whereas my stuff is different because I use color.”
Peterson instead uses the coffee as a background, first cutting the paper and then layering coffee on top of it by painting it on. After letting the coffee sit for a couple of hours, Peterson uses watercolors or ink to paint on an array of natural images, such as a cardinal perched on a piece of wood, or a lighthouse seen from a distance.
The idea came after Peterson was brainstorming possible Christmas gifts for his mother seven years ago. He was Googling ink and paper works when he ran into one with a stained background. He tried to recreate it himself.
“I tried to stain it with tea, but it wasn’t dark or rich enough, and then I tried coffee, which just worked,” he says.
He finished it off by writing “Live, Laugh, Love” in Sharpie over the stain. It originally was a one-time project. Peterson was finishing up school at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and didn’t see being a full-time artist as a possibility, but his love of art had been rekindled.
Peterson’s interest in art had started years earlier as an adolescent.
“I’ve pretty much done art forever,” he says. “High school is where it really started, though. I was very close to my high school art teacher and he pushed me into it a little bit.”
Entering college, Peterson decided to major in art education, but quickly changed his major as he realized he didn’t want to teach.
“Going into college I didn’t have any other idea of what to do and I had a couple of friends in the exercise science program,” he says. “I changed it because I liked working out and being outdoors.”
He only took a few art courses in college, and for the most part put his art hobby on hold.
That all changed. A couple years after his first attempt during Christmas, he tried coffee staining again, using a Sharpie to draw over it. This time, he posted photos on social media where people showed interest.
“I’d get motivated to sit down and draw things for a couple hours, and then for weeks at a time I wasn’t really drawing anything,” he says. “Once I started making the coffee stuff and actually selling them, that started to motivate me, and I’ve kept on painting since then.”
Gradually his work has transformed from crafts to art, a change that he attributes to his use of watercolor.
“When I first started I was doing craftier stuff with sayings and everything was all Sharpie,” he says. “After a year of that I started to use the watercolor and the color just completely changed it. I’ve been doing it since then.”
Peterson has started to branch out from his signature coffee-stained watercolors to explore how he can use the coffee concept in other ways.
In March, Peterson began painting tiny watercolors within the circular ring of a coffee cup, which have already become popular among buyers.
“They’re all outdoor scenes, because I love the West and I’m actually planning on moving out there eventually,” he says. “I just like being in the mountains.”
Peterson’s work can be viewed on his website, artworkontherun.com, and his Instagram of the same name.
