Foreword

Was it Twitter? Facebook? I don’t remember the portal that drew me into Nik Sharma’s blog back in 2015, before I knew anything about him, but I recall feeling the tug of having clicked into something revolutionary.

There was nothing overtly challenging about scrolling through Nik’s blog, A Brown Table. In a way, his process shots of pastry-making were anything but iconoclastic. They showed softly blistered yeast doughs, book-fold sheets of yellow puff paste, cooked fruit bubbling through vents in crusts, against backdrops that receded into blackness, as in seventeenth-century Italian still lifes. Just like the ones in Giuseppe Recco’s paintings of fruit or flowers, the inanimate objects in Nik’s pictures were luminous.