Noah Verrier Turns Fast Food Into Fine Art
A Tallahassee oil painter distills society’s obsession with fast food in his masterful still lifes, which go for thousands.
To paraphrase an old saying, one man’s junk food is another one’s treasure. At least if that man is Noah Verrier, whose oil paintings of highly processed snacks, cheeseburgers hot from the drive-thru window, luminous gummy bears and other dubious dietary choices have made him a viral sensation and a highly collectible artist.
Last fall, The New York Times praised his “particular flair for the zeitgeist,” nodding toward his hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views across X, Instagram, Reddit and other online platforms where he posts images of his work. Other outlets have likened the 44-year-old Tallahassee artist to Édouard Manet, the 19th century modernist who painted “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the 18th century master of the still life—two of the most celebrated Frenchmen to ever pick up a brush.
It’s only appropriate that we meet in a coffee shop across the street from Tallahassee’s so-called “historic” Whataburger. A painting of one of the popular chain’s combo meals, marked by the orange stripes and bold “W” logo of its packaging, has 4,582 likes on the artist’s Instagram page as of writing. Invitingly arrayed, with burger unwrapped and two French fries lazily dipped in a tiny, unsealed ketchup container, the morsels are graced by a swooning sunflower, which leans out of a semi-obscured Ball jar.
Such paintings, which run the gamut of branded munchies and beverages, can sell for as much as $15,000 and have generated commissions from some of the featured corporations and beyond, including McDonald’s, Domino’s, Little Caesars, Walmart, QuikTrip and even the Brooklyn Nets basketball franchise. A recent flurry of national media attention, including a spot on CBS News Sunday Morning, kept Verrier sleepless over the holidays, rushing to meet demand.
“There’s this connection of all the cultural trickle that this is having,” he says, “and I’m not full of myself like that. I don’t really believe it, and then I have actual brands call me, ‘Hey, this is Popeyes. So, we want to talk to you about doing a painting,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh shit. People are really seeing this.’”
Verrier’s success, though driven by social media, comes after years of effort. He offers anecdotes about dismal trips to weekend art fairs when he came home with “minus $600 over and over and over again.” It’s no wonder he’s a little spun. It’s also a vindication.
“What the hell is happening?” the artist asks, lightheartedly. “Especially when they told me in school that nobody gives a shit about oil painting. ‘Painting is dead, Noah. Why do you keep doing it?’”
One answer is that it’s probably encoded from childhood. Verrier has an early memory of his mother painting. “She was doing Modigliani watercolors … Then she did a Picasso copy, and she was really good. It looked just like the Picasso,” he says. “I remember seeing that, and it set off a spark.”
Years later, Verrier graduated with BFA and MFA degrees from Florida State University, where he also taught. He recalls exhibiting paintings there of a Heineken can with sunflowers in it. “I really like cans,” says the artist, evoking the spirit of Andy Warhol, who elevated the humble Campbell’s Soup can from the supermarket shelf to a museum icon. “It’s really beautiful to think that you can take this mundane object and make it kind of beautiful.”
Yet, Verrier may have had his real breakthrough staring at the sun.
While working on his MFA, Verrier set up a durational project, making 150 sunset oil paintings on the same site every day. “The strict structure he kept to had led him to adventurous experimentation,” recalls Cynthia Hollis, the Tallahassee curator and former FSU professor who taught Verrier. “One day he slyly commented on his process, ‘boredom can cede to fearlessness.’” The idea still informs his current work, which Hollis calls “a combination of pop art subject matter executed with Vermeer-esqe facility.”
The high/low aspect of the paintings is, of course, a big part of their appeal. They evoke classic still lifes but then have a giggle: Look at this beautiful flower … surrounded by Taco Bell. In the process, the juxtapositions also compel a closer look at what people see every day and never think much about. The craft is evident beyond the humor in that the paintings make you feel hungry, nothing more so than the delicate globs of peanut butter and jelly oozing between triangles of white bread, light gleaming off the impressionistic brush strokes.
You can take this mundane object and make it beautiful.
—Noah Verrier
Verrier confesses to a practice of “method acting.” What he paints, he eats (or drinks). “You have to get it and try it, find a connection with it,” he says. “Do you love it? Do you hate it? If you hate it, you’re probably not going to paint it. I have to do a whiskey one right now, but I don’t want to chug a bunch of whiskey in the middle of the day. And at night I’m too tired, so I keep putting it off.”
As to what it all means, the artist finds it harder to say. He falls into arguments with his wife about it. “She says, ‘You have to paint this. Everyone’s gonna love this. I have the perfect idea.’ And I say, ‘It’s not about the subjects.’ I don’t know why I take it so personally.”
For sure, the paintings punch a lot of buttons. And in ways that can be ambiguous.
“It’s the food. It makes you salivate. It’s nostalgic. It hits a lot of different things. I think it’s all about the art of it. It’s not a formula. It’s not about the fact that everyone remembers these things, but it is,” Verrier says. “To my wife’s argument, she is right. It is about the subject, but I don’t like to hear that because I like to think that it’s a cool, really great painting.”
Or maybe it’s both.
