Are you drawing me? asked a woman whom I was drawing in a Costa Coffee shop yesterday. She didn’t seem too perturbed when I admitted that I was, merely shrugging her shoulders and suggesting that there might be more attractive people to sketch. I did try to continue with the drawing but she kept catching my eye so I shifted my attention elsewhere. I prefer to draw unseen, particularly by the object of my study. I like to catch people unawares when their movements and gestures are less self-conscious and often, as a result, more poignant.
I’d travelled to a distant town in order to see an exhibition I was to review, hence my visiting of an unfamiliar Costa. It was dark and cold in there and an age until people actually sat down (most were ordering take-away coffees). However, an interesting interaction began to play out before my eyes. An area manager had clearly turned up and was gently admonishing and training the manager and staff during which the coffee grinder went kaput and the queue built steadily and ominously. I tried to capture what I felt to be the anxiety of it all, though the manager appeared rather sanguine. Elsewhere in the café were what was clearly a mother and son (she talked, he absently-mindedly listened), the woman I’d tried to draw noisily telling her friend about her new kitchen, a middle-aged man with huge fingers eating a burger and another giant of man with his baseball cap on backwards.
I just stuck to my fountain pen, it was too dark to use anything else and I was nervous about the show I’d yet to visit. I wasn’t pleased with my efforts but when I scanned my sketchbook they didn’t seem so bad. Sometimes it’s like that, isn’t it? You just have to keep doing what you’re doing until you get that click….
