DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION GALLERY
saltfish & plantain
(get baptized in the ocean of the hungry)
Saltfish & Plantain (Get Baptized In The Ocean Of The Hungry), Valerie Caesar, 2026.
When I arranged this array of objects onto my counter, it fell into a tableau so quintessentially Caribbean that it couldn’t help but initiate a whole-ass photo shoot. I’d been traipsing through Flatbush, the neighborhood I grew up in, and ducked into a produce shop to see if they had any ripe mangoes. Standing in line to pay, I spotted a package of smoked herring in the fridge case, and couldn’t resist. Although preparing dried smoked fish involves a series of water soaking or boiling to release the salt used to cure the flesh, it’s worth it to enjoy a visually beautiful meal of tender, flaky, flavorful forkfuls of fish, seasoned with aromatic onions and sweet, colorful peppers.
I actually began by rendering the image using a CMYK halftone brush. I’ve been wanting to play with this style with a relatively simple image with recognizable shapes and simple colors.
Saltfish & Plantain (CMYK halftone), Valerie Caesar, 2026.
This resulted in a starkly printed version of the image that evokes the cereal boxes, comic books and children's readers of my youth, for which I couldn’t help creating a children’s book-style mockup. Adding the words gave it an extra Richard Scarry picture book-type feel.
Saltfish & Plantain (CMYK halftone storybook), Valerie Caesar, 2026.
Saltfish & Plantain (CMYK halftone gif; separate and additive), Valerie Caesar, 2026.
Ultimately, I wanted to see this image a bit more realistically rendered. So I returned to my favored greasy oil pastel brush to capture the shades of green that comprise the plantain, the silvery brown, delicately marbled flesh and skin of the dried fish, and the varying red hues of tomato and pepper.
Saltfish & Plantain (sans background), Valerie Caesar, 2026.
Framing the work has proven to be the hardest thing for me. I usually know what I want to draw, but more often than not, it’s an object floating in abject space. As inspired as I am by spot illustration, the details of the landscapes within which my works reside escape me. I’m the last to know where the hell we are, which actually corresponds to my lack of (navigational) direction in real life. It’s terrible. Here, I returned faithfully to the triangle patterned background that is surely becoming a trademark for me. I don’t mind, as I like the way it looks, as well as the way it ties my works to a universe that is uniquely mine. But between you and me, I didn’t have any other ideas! Shrug. Anyway, I dig that this piece is a non-self-conscious nod to the culture and cuisine that raised me, and that I still love to this day.
UPDATE: About a week following this post, I created a detail video for Instagram, and decided to add music from Erykah Badu’s The Healer. I had been thinking about the lyrics to that song in the context of this Small Black Stories-style video I’d posted just before it. It features a walk down a sidewalk next to a supermarket which had chosen to display its sale items on sandwich-board signs. I was struck by the particularly Afro-Caribbean offerings: cow feet, cooking bananas, yucca — even the Domino sugar on sale was reminiscent of the complicated history of African enslavement in the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean. (see A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, Kara Walker’s monumental installation in the old Domino Sugar factory.)
In this video, I highlight a phrase in the song — “Underwater/stovetop/blue flame/scientist” — that comes just before this work’s titular extraction.
Underwater Stovetop Blue Flame Scientist, Valerie Caesar, 2026.
I was initially inspired to use this song because it is called The Healer, and I wanted to draw a connection between the spiritual technology of healing in Afro-Caribbean culinary culture — the work of our underwater stovetop blue flame scientist ancestors. In the following line, Erykah sings:
Get baptized/In the ocean/Of the hungry
Ironically — or not, considering the very nature of magic being explored — my admission of ignorance around choosing the blue patterned background for this work has been expanded by the understanding that this food illustration exists within a universe of oceans and loss, of baptism and birth, of hunger, and of healing.
The strength of divination plays out in my work whether I am aware of it or not. Of course it’s blue.
A CLOSER LOOK
Watch these two short videos at the full screen setting to view both the making of Saltfish & Plantain, (pastel and CMYK halftone versions) in closer detail, and the final version, Saltfish & Plantain (Get Baptized In The Ocean Of The Hungry), and hear the music paired with it.