Portrait of a Cheese Artist: Mike Geno
Mike Geno likes to joke that he lives in a house that cheese built and that he drives a car literally funded by wheels. Painting cheese portraits is his full-time job. Yes, cheese portraits. You’ve heard of pet portraits, often commissioned by pet lovers? Well, cheese portraits are commissioned by serious curd nerds, providing evidence that fromage fandom indeed runs deep. In fact, one of Geno’s patrons owns over forty of his paintings.
If you’re wondering how someone becomes a cheese portrait painter, you should know this: Geno studied painting in college and graduate school, working as a meat cutter to help offset the cost of tuition. A food lover from birth, he became inspired to paint meat. “I started with a steak, a beautiful steak,” he recalls. Later, he progressed to other foods – doughnuts, hot dogs, TastyKakes. Cheese became beguiling to him as a subject when he leafed through a book by Wayne Thiebaud, an artist famous for painting sumptuous pies, pastries, and cakes. Geno thought, “Why not cheese?”
Since 2011, Geno has painted around 400 dairy-centric images, from goopy Epoisses – that classic French stinker – to esoteric wedges like Summertime Blues, a Minnesota cheese from the Caves at Fairibault infused with a limited release beer from nearby Summit Brewing. While he takes commissions, he likes to rely on inspiration at cheese counters and makes a point to stroll through shops in search of interesting shapes, streaks, flecks, bumps, cracks, or histories. Geno, who paints from life, never photos, loves the aesthetics of cheese. Follow him into a cheese shop, like Di Bruno Bros. in Philadelphia, and you’ll see him devour the counter with his enormous brown eyes, sampling anything that catches his attention. The perk of his job, he says, is that he gets to eat his subject.
Mike Geno’s studio, photo courtesy of the artist
Currently, Geno is working on a Cheese Map of the United States, which is viewable on his website. It’s designed to draw attention to a wide variety of mostly small-batch cheeses made around the U.S. His goal? To paint at least one cheese from each state. The project, which he launched in 2014, has introduced him to “other artists – the cheesemakers themselves!” Many of them, he notes, are highly skilled artisans who have a hand in every step of production, from raising animals and planting pastures to making cheese by hand.
For his cheese map, Geno is especially keen to paint unusual cheeses, which is why he was thrilled to receive a wheel of Perdido from Alabama for one of his early portraits. (Wheels of Perdido are rubbed with carob, which makes them look like velvet cushions.) Perdido’s maker, Alyce Birchenough, personally delivered one to him in a cooler at a conference. “I’ve been waiting for you to call me,” she told him, wryly, as she handed him her cheese. Birchenough, a graceful woman with long white hair made raw-milk cheese in Alabama for 40 years under her Sweet Home Farm label; she is now retired, but her cheese lives on – thanks to Mike Geno’s homage!
Over time, rare American cheeses have appeared on Geno’s stoop by the dozens, including a wheel of Ocean Brie-eze from Naked Cow creamery in Hawaii which oozed a gray liquid center. “The cheesemaker used squid ink for color!” Geno marvels. Then, along came Big Bluff Tomme from Missouri, a goat cheese rubbed with olive oil and Reishi mushroom powder. “There’s so much creativity within the cheese world itself,” Geno says.
So far, it’s taken Geno six years to amass cheeses from every state. “I’m still looking for a couple,” he says, noting that he has leads on Mississippi and Louisiana, but so far, no Bayou Blue. Still, he knows it exists!
The most challenging cheese to source? “So far, it’s been Alaska,” he says. Through social media, he finally connected to a woman named Sarah Jepson via her Instagram account @milkmansfirstwife. “She makes cheese from her husband’s six cows,” he marvels. When Geno reached out about his cheese map project, Jepson decided to create an entirely new cheese for him to paint, using her own hothouse peppers for color. When she finally sent it to him, she confessed she wasn’t sure what to call it.
“Her kids named it for her,” Geno remembers. “They called it Winter Fury.”
Mike Geno cheese paintings, courtesy of the artist
These back-and-forth conversations with cheesemakers have brought an unexpected source of joy and inspiration for Geno that he hadn’t experienced in his thirty years as a painter. “By representing their art as my art on this map, there’s a whole new level of relating to cheese and cheesemakers,” he says. “I’m really lucky. I’ve gotten to find out how nice people are.”
Media attention from Vice Munchies, The New York Times, and even Esquire have, in part, fueled Geno’s career (he’s also very outgoing!), but Geno is quick to point out that there is something special about his subject. “My portraits of other foods, like sushi and bacon, have never generated this kind of interest,” he says. “The cheese community and the delicious appeal of cheese itself breeds a unique scene and an unusual level of fervor.”
It also helps that at Geno’s studio – located in a former brush-bristle factory – his cheese portraits are spread across one giant wall like an epic floor-to-ceiling grazing board. When sunlight streams through the windows, the paint looks wet, each cheese almost lick-able.