PHILADELPHIA

HOW does a guy get to the point where he can’t stop cranking out paintings of cheese?

In the case of Mike Geno, a 41-year-old artist and food fanatic here, it’s instructive to rewind to a phase in his life when he couldn’t stop cranking out paintings of steak.

That was more than a decade ago, when he was a graduate student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the phrase “starving artist” served as a distressingly apt description of his life. One day, Mr. Geno said, he was sitting in his studio, “very poor and hungry,” when a friend dropped by.

“I said, ‘I should just do a big juicy steak painting — something you want to bite your teeth into,’ ” he recalled the other day at his apartment, where the walls are covered with oil paintings of jelly doughnuts, hot dogs, croissants, slices of pancetta, pieces of sushi, curiously erotic whorls of bacon and many, many wedges of cheese.

“So the next day I went out and bought one,” he said. “I chose porterhouse because I thought that was the most quintessential steak.”