Odd taste in art
Among painter’s projects is Aaron Rodgers on a Cheez-It
We’re very close to the point where literally anything about the Green Bay Packers is news. If you cough up something green and gold, call your doctor and then us.
Case in point: John Kettman’s painting of Aaron Rodgers on a Cheez-It cracker. I’m part of the media mob covering it.
Why a Cheez-It? Simple. John thought an actual piece of cheese would make for an eventually moldy masterpiece. And Better Cheddars crackers were in the running but found to be too brittle.
The artist is from LaSalle in north central Bears country. He’s not much of a football fan, but like much of America he did watch last Sunday’s Packers playoff victory over the Dallas Cowboys.
Rodgers’ excellence inspired John to capture his image in a unique way.
“If I painted it on a canvas, you wouldn’t be interested in it. I painted it on a cracker. Nobody paints on a cracker,” he said.
His medium is indeed his message. John likes capturing famous people on unusual and often tiny objects. To name just a few: Carrie Underwood on a kernel of corn; Star Wars characters on grains of rice; Donald Trump on a matchstick and a pumpkin that got previous media attention; Peyton Manning on a candy heart; Prince on a dime.
His previous cracker creation was the clever Putin on the Ritz.
“I put Johnny Appleseed on an apple seed. I put Donald Trump’s face on a meatloaf,” he said. Go to his YouTube site, American764, if you want to see his creations talk and sing.
John is 52, a newlywed and unemployed at the moment. He worked as machinist for 24 years and now puts most of his energy into his art. His ties to Wisconsin are loose, except for one big one. It was during a visit to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Wisconsin Dells museum that he got the idea to paint on rice.
“The cracker, I thought, was going to be a piece of cake, but it wasn’t. If you look at a Cheez-It, it’s got a hole in the middle. It’s like a pit. I had to fill that all in with paint, and then go across and try to make the face level,” he said.
Plus, the smell of the cracker made him hungry so he snacked on other Cheez-Its as he worked at his home studio.
The trick when working on teeny art is to slow your heart rate and get in the zone with soothing music. He stuck chewed bubble gum on the back of the cracker, held onto that wad with a tweezers in one hand, and painted with a small brush in the other.
He found photos of Rodgers online, including some showing the exact state of his beard during Sunday’s game.
“His eyes are rounded, yet they’re close together,” John said. “His nose is almost the perfect shape. He does have dimpled cheeks with smile lines.” We know, we know, he’s adorable. The Rodgers piece took him eight hours to finish, from 8 p.m. Monday until 4 a.m. Tuesday. Once he adds a final clear coat, it should last forever.
John said he’d be happy to buy more crackers and just keep going.
“If somebody wants to hire me to do the entire team and have a one-ofa-kind set in their Green Bay Packers library or man cave, I’m the guy to do it.”