I thought it might be a nice throwback to the 19th c cafes of Paris, full of artists furiously drawing in their sketchbooks, to take a model with me to the local Starbucks and draw him from life while enjoying some coffee and conversation. And so we went one sunny afternoon, he with his good looks and me with an oversized sketchbook; a gift he had given me for my most recent birthday. I paid him for his sitting with vast amounts of delicious coffee and sugary treats, which was all he asked for. What I didn't take into consideration was that my model is nervously hyper without the addition of caffeine and/or sugar to his system and it took only a very short time before he could no longer focus on what he was looking at, let alone sit still for more than a nanosecond. In the end, frustrated with my jacked up, itchy model, I took some photos of him sitting there across from me and we left so he could burn off his nervous energy. The rather convoluted evolution of this portrait is: begun, from life, in a bustling coffee shop and finished, from photos, very quietly on my own time.
Portrait of Griffin Marks, graphite on paper, 2010
