I had three people asking what I was doing in a space of two days. This is unusual even considering the fact that I’ve been drawing the customers in the same coffee shop for almost five months now. The first one was a man we see regularly (the one I asked if he used patchouli oil). I’d been to the loo and I heard him talking to my partner on my way back. ‘Is your wife drawing?’ he said. The second was a Northern Irish woman who was sitting at a table next to ours with her daughter. I’d seen her looking over at me and as they got ready to go she too asked if I was drawing. She bubbled over with energy (perhaps it was excitement at seeing her daughter who is studying here). And the question soon led to an explanation of the fact that she’d ‘couldn’t draw for toffee’ but that her brother could but he gave it up to become a science teacher. She was marvellous, all those words spilling off her tongue, interspersed with an almost constant refrain of ‘What was I going to say?’ The third questioner was one of the wild swimmers that frequent the café after their morning dip. ‘Is she drawing?’ she asked my partner, adding, ‘Can I be nosy and have a look?’ She leant over and was seemingly delighted. ‘Gosh, aren’t you clever,’ she said, ‘and so fast. I can’t draw to save my life.’ I shrink from such notice and from having my books flicked through but it is also a warming thing somehow. After all, they are my subjects, are they not? When she asked ‘What do you do with them?’ that was altogether more tricky. ‘It’s drawing practice,’ I said, qualifying it by repeating, ‘I’m practicing.’ She just looked more bemused. And her question continued to hang in the air.
The uncertainty regarding the privacy and ‘safety’ of the people I draw preys on my mind. Am I hurting them? I ask myself. There’s the woman who came in alone, after being granted a respite day from her ‘frail’ husband, and the man we now call ‘tracksuit man’ (apparently he researches genealogy in the town’s library, though this doesn’t explain why he dresses like football coach with his tracksuit top tucked neatly into his tracksuit bottoms).
And the gaggle of girls with hair and tights in a variety of pinks who commandeered the long table.
I’d set myself the task of trying to capture the queue in its entirety. A challenging goal, I think.
Perhaps that’s it. The only way to get round the safety thing is to draw the now countless dogs who come to the shop with their owners.
