The restrictions in Wales limiting the interaction in ‘our’ coffee shop seem set to continue. So I make do. I drew both Saturday and Sunday and focussed on trying to capture a sense of place, and whatever stillness there was. There’s a little table with two seats in the stairwell that a few people frequented, mostly single drinkers but the occasional couple, and it was they who absorbed my attention. There is always this internal panic – will I get their gestures, their gait, their characteristics before they move? I tried. A Malaysian girl occupied the table first. Ignoring her croissant and coffee she spent most of her time engrossed with her phone (at one point playing music from it which competed uncomfortably with the cafe’s own melodic fare). She looked sulky. The next day the middle-aged man who also reads his phone but from a plastic book-like holder took the table over, stretching right out. I was delighted. I love to draw him and since the current restrictions he’s taken to sitting at the other end of the shop out of reach of my fixed stare.
I drew him over and over again. ‘You really get him,’ said my partner. I don’t know. It’s a moveable thing and hard to pin down. I love the way he relaxes. He sits still, unlike many of my ‘sitters’, absorbed in what he is reading. And he is warmer towards us now, saying good morning, though if he is aware of my drawing him he is utterly uncurious. Later a big man came.
He too was phone-absorbed. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone in there reading a book. His flesh fell over his waistband in great folds. Smartly dressed in a button-down shirt and with tanned skin that set off his well-cut coiffure, he wore his glasses on his head like he was on a yacht in Cannes. He lay back in the chair to read, a supine position that he would suddenly spring from to devour his food and coffee. The weekend was quiet but with a steady flow of customers, which in some ways is better. There was enough energy to give me momentum but not too much so as to overwhelm.
I tried different tactics, drawing fast and slow, using line, wash and splurges of felt pen and ink. I don’t know, I need to get a distance from them. But the flow was good, and I felt I’d worked hard by the end of it. I miss hearing people’s chatter though. Yes, very much.
It’s gone well today, hasn’t it? asked my partner. Yes, I said, I think it has.
