At a Eugene Safeway, this artist’s canvas is a cookie

The Safeway on 18th Avenue in Eugene harbors an artist studio of sorts.

About 20 shades are lined up on a counter behind the grocery store’s bakery case, each color having been blended and scooped into a piping bag. The medium: Buttercream on cookie.

“I’m obsessed with color,” Maxwell Schultz, 41, said. His white apron is often stained with skin tones, earth tones, neon green, classic red, cerulean.

The Eugene artist has produced hundreds of cakes and cookies since becoming a decorator at Safeway 2½ years ago. Today, his subject is a toothy, gray beast reminiscent of the monsters in “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Schultz’s edible art mimics the gruesome, turbulent and outside-the-lines beauty of both the mortal realm and the mythical world of fairies and mermaids. He does not shy away from textures and themes that might be considered unsuitable for an edible cookie, such as raw meat and a veiny heart.

There are bloodied mouths, the terrifying and ecstatic expressions of clowns — “Any time I make a monster or a full face, it flies off the shelf,” he said — Ghostface’s stealthy gait, an eerie landscape of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” crew (pre-massacre), a horizontal cut of Frankenstein’s monster’s head.

You can tell his favorite holiday is Halloween. 

The canvas

Schultz had no cake decorating experience before Safeway. He just needed a job.

He’d moved to Portland from Chicago in 2009 with a friend. There, he helped design posters, album covers and merch for Morning Teleportation, of which Schultz’s friend had been a band member.

After about 15 years, he relocated to Eugene and applied for baking jobs, his other passion. Safeway was the only place that called him back. So he baked, worked the Starbucks kiosk and packaged goods.

When a cake decorating position opened up, Schultz thought, “As an artist, I could try that.”

His first works were “shaky,” he remembered, as cake decorating requires almost surgical precision. Those curious about their hand strength and fine motor control should try to pipe the fur of a ring-tailed lemur on a 12-inch cookie. You must also get the piping bag to pull out at just the right consistency, else you’ll have an avalanche of too-soft frosting, hand cramps or crusty buttercream bits.

Despite his lack of training, Schultz didn’t go by the book, literally. He rejected a grocery store directory of decorating ideas, as it reminded him of the art his teachers made in the ’90s.

“It just hasn’t changed since then,” Schultz said. “It feels like someone else’s art, and it’s harder for me to make someone else’s art if I’m not interested in it. So I did my own thing, and luckily stuff sold so well that I was able to keep doing that.” 

He started posting his cakes and cookies on Instagram almost immediately, eventually gaining more than 5,000 followers. Now he’s known as “the local cake guy” and often sees people posting videos or taking photos of his art. The more people bought his work, he said, the more he was inspired to make “whacky and unusual” art, and his brain “just blossomed” from there.

As one of his Instagram followers summed it up, Schultz’s work is an “ephemeral gallery of chaotic masterpieces.” 

It’s also affordable: Safeway’s large decorated cookie cakes are less than $15, so a lot of college and high school students will buy his work. 

“Safeway has so much material,” Schultz said. “It’s really fun to play with colored sugar and the different food colorings, and knowing that it’s all edible adds an element to the art that I’ve never had in anything I’ve previously made.”

Fat over lean

Schultz calls his cookie style “not perfect.”

“I work with another decorator, and her style is perfect,” he said. “Everything is smooth, her flowers are beautiful. I don’t have the patience for that, so you can always see it’s handmade.”

The rugged and rough temperament of his style is ideal for showcasing the natural world, another favorite subject. You can almost feel the slime on the banana slug, the pointed ears of a wild rabbit, hear the whisper of conifers around Crater Lake.

Schultz has gone viral a few times since he started posting, including an Instagram reel from May 17 that got more than 47,000 likes. Last year, the Spice Girls shared his edible rendition of the iconic girl group against a bright pink frosting backdrop.

His work recently brought him to the national stage: This June, Schultz competed against three other decorators in the International Dairy Deli Bakery Association’s Cake’d event in Orlando on June 7-8. The annual trade show attracts more than 10,000 attendees and 1,000 exhibitors. 

While Schultz didn’t win the two-day cake decorating competition, he said he’s proud of what he created and called the competition a “special and totally fun experience.” 

As for what’s next, he’ll be experimenting with paint in the piped buttercream style to make his cake designs permanent. He eventually wants to make a decent living from his art and travel the world while decorating cakes. 

“There are so many places with rich history in Europe that I would gain ENDLESS inspiration from,” he said in an Instagram message from Orlando. “I’m really feeling the pull to get out & see the incredible public art of past masters through their facades, statues, ornamentations.”

For now, he’s coming back to Eugene as Safeway’s “local cake guy.”

“I’m so glad that I have been posting for so long, because, like, what a body of work, as an artist, that’s worth more than anything [Safeway] could pay me here, and I will have that for the rest of my life,” Schultz said from Safeway’s bakery. “That really excites me and inspires me to continue making art.”

Not like watching paint dry

Cake decorating combines Schultz’s two favorite mediums: sculpture and painting. 

Art students will know his 3D designs as impasto, a technique of applying paint so thick you can see marks left by the brush or palette knife or, in this case, the decorating tip. 

While an artist all his life, Schultz started taking the discipline more seriously in junior high school. He’d sketch his favorite celebrities on graph paper, square by square, perfecting the iconic features of Julia Roberts, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. 

Those painstaking drawings, along with oil painting, which he studied while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, primed him for cake decorating.

Frosting mimics the smooth, thick texture of wet oil paint. But that’s where the similarities end. 

The drying time for oil paintings — several hours to several days, and more months to fully cure — is kryptonite for the average tinkerer and perfectionist. Schultz, however, finds it stressful. In school, he used to add liquid and other materials to help speed up the drying process so he could move to the next piece.

“There’s something so instantaneous about [cake decorating] that just gets the art produced faster, and I can see my visions quicker,” he said. “As an impatient artist, that’s been awesome.”

Schultz’s art is not too good to eat. In fact, the buttercream’s expiration date is among the most freeing parts of cake decorating.

“One thing I love about this medium is knowing that it’s going to get eaten, and that it will spoil and go bad,” he said. “It pushes me to just get it done and not worry about it, because I know it’s not going to last forever.

“It took a little getting used to, knowing that the art would disappear, but once I accepted that, it excited me.”

If you go

Artist and cake decorator Maxwell Schultz works at Safeway, 145 E. 18th Ave., Eugene. He decorates three days a week, so the display case won’t always be stocked with his work, and shoppers should call in advance for special requests. Follow him on Instagram.