Calming Moments Sketching Cafés and Cakes

Wednesday 22nd January

I am an hour and a half early for my train back to Galway, and I am full of blissful anticipation of an afternoon’s sketch, but where will I go? I decide you can’t go wrong with the National Gallery.

Before I launch into the description of my afternoon, I have a question for you: am I the baddie?

I’m at the Turner exhibition with my older daughter Honor in the National Gallery the morning before I make this sketch. It’s late January, after which month they put the exhibition away for the year. In the café beforehand, I order an oat flat white. The oat milk is awful, much stronger than my usual bland brand. I ask them to change my (almost untouched) coffee for a fresh non-oat one and a lovely smiling young girl (“new” Irish from her accent) says of course, that I should take it to her colleague at the till where the coffees are made and she will make me a fresh one. The girl at the till is extremely young, elphin and pretty, with very huge fake eyelashes. I very politely ask this young girl if she will change it. She says no. “Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean you can just have another one for free,” she says, in a broad Dublin accent. “You chose it.” “Sure,” I said, “but your colleague said you wouldn’t mind.” “That was her,” says the till girl, “you’re talking to me now.” Chastened and feeling slightly foolish I go off with my horrible oat milk flat white, and back at the table Honor says she saw another customer get a fresh coffee that she complained was too cold, and that she, Honor, will be only too pleased to talk to the girl’s manager. (Honor loves talking to the manager.) I say no, I can fight my own battles, but then when we have had our coffee and Honor is full of blueberry muffin and fruit salad, I say I have changed my mind, and will she go and fight my battle please? “No,” says Honor, “I’m not feeling it any more, sorry. I’m all calm now after my coffee and bun.”

Am I right? Am I wrong? Am I being a horrible customer? Is the customer always right? Are those fake eyelashes ridiculous? Would I suit them?

But back to this particular afternoon, the day after Oatgate. I buy myself a non-oat milk flat white and order a cinnamon bun that I don’t at all need. I try to put myself in the shoes of my shyer students who find sketching in public a little anxiety-inducing, and think of how I would proceed in order to feel a little more secure: I decide that being at one of the high tables against the wall would offer a sense of safety, and up I climb onto a lofty chair.

I approach the sketch with teaching in mind: if I do that every time I start a sketch, it means I am always prepared for class. This is important, because there is little in the way of structure in my job, other than what I impose on myself.

Allow me to explain. I have never really had a job, but only gigs. The jobs I have had have always been freelance, and over when they’re over: if they’ve been longer-term, it has been because I organised ongoing teaching sessions. I’ve been turned down for plenty of jobs – so many, in fact, that by my mid-thirties I figured I was unemployable – so it’s kind of strange for me to find myself with a JOB, a CAREER, that began in my early fifties. There are probably millions of women like me, who studied for a few years, then met a man, raised a family and were never actually employed along the way. If that’s you, I see you. And you kind of have to fake the confidence until the sheer track record behind you makes you feel like you’ve earned it.

But again, back to the day in question. As I sketch, I wonder what the sticking points would be for someone without decades of experience behind them. I figure getting the setting right will be a good start – the bones of the place – and so I sketch out the windows in a dilute watercolour. I knew they would probably be wrong, and by sketching lightly in watercolour first you have a second or even third chance to have another go.

Once they’re looking okay, I outline them in fude pen, having drawn those pretty lights on first. Then I sketch (again in a dilute watercolour) the lines of the tables, so that I can them add little people on top, like playing with a doll’s house and marching people round.

Then I choose the lady nearest to me to start adding people. She has long brown wavy hair and she’s grabbing a quick bowl of soup. She’s only there a few minutes. When she’s fully painted I move onto the people further away from me, filling them in as I go. I try to guess which ones are about to leave from the level of their wine or coffee. I draw the tall black guy at the till: he is very attractive and it’s nice to draw him, even though I make him look like a dweeb rather than the Adonis he is. I get loads of time to draw the chap on the laptop, but get him very wrong all the same.

I keep the colour palette very muted. I choose the colours that can’t be left out – hair colour, skin tones, the orange chairs of the café – and use those as the basis of the colours I choose. I use Naples Yellow on the wall, which isn’t quite correct, but it allows me to deepen it up slightly around the lights to make them glow a little.

That darkening of the wall is an example of watching your values: there are others to be looked after too, and I make sure all the dark bits are dark enough. Take the window panes, for example: if I want them to portray a sense of depth or a sense of a room on the other side, I have to darken up the glass, particularly on the left (in the central one) where it borders the wall.

At last it’s time to head away, to Heuston Station and my train to Galway. There has been a protest outside the Dáil and the bus route has been altered, so I end up walking a bit more than I have intended. Soon I am on the train home and I add mullions on the window panes, in white gel pen.

Wednesday 29th January

Marcel and I are refugees from Galway, hounded out of our home by the Storm Éowyn power cut. We have gone to Bray on the East Coast, where my parents live. It is wonderful to be surrounded by light and power, and to be given a wonderfully warm welcome. It suits my mother too, who is heading back across the country to a monastery, for a few days’ respite from looking after my father, who is 90 and has dementia. My brother was going to do the “dadsitting” but since Marcel and I are here, we’re delighted to take over. But as anyone who’s been in that situation knows, it can be a little wearing – emotional and confusing – and on this morning my nerves, never the smoothest anyway, are getting a little ragged. I sit in my mother’s bedroom and start to sketch, confident that I will find it soothing. Sure enough I quickly feel better. You can watch the whole thing on my YouTube channel but don’t forget to Like and Subscribe – I never remember to say that in my videos.

Later the same morning…

I am delighted with the surge of endorphins the sketching has produced, and things only get better as Marcel and I head out for a coffee, as the sun is out in force on this January morning. We stop at Finnbees on Bray Seafront, where they do great coffee, and go upstairs with dear little Reuben the terrier, who is very good and who loves an outing. We take a cosy table in the corner by the stairwell, which has comfy armchairs, and Reuben sits tethered under the table, motionless and alert and wearing an expression of fluffy white confusion.

Over apple pie and cream (Marcel) and cinnamon bun (me) we settle down, still so grateful for the creature comforts of power, warmth and coffee. I look across the stairwell towards the terrace. We’ve decided to stay indoors, as we think our coffees might get cold too fast. I look across the stairwell towards the terrace and see three chaps playing chess at a table just across from me. I can’t believe my luck – there’s a good chance they’ll be there for a while – it’s very rare that you can be confident your subject isn’t going to move for as long as it takes to sketch them. I get stuck in, concentrating on both drawing and painting the men before they leave. I outline the border between sun and shade all along the length of the figures, so that I can capture the strong sunlight if the guys get up to leave, or if the sun goes behind a cloud.

Soon enough they’re all finished and the setting has been added and Marcel encourages me to go out and show them. “And show them your SketchPocket too,” he says. Hmm…a but cringe, but okay.

Turns out these are great guys – well, I only know that about the middle one, anyway, as the other two guys don’t speak. Dan is the name of the middle guy, and his brother Ben is in the light coat and hat, Julius from Lithuania on the right. But Dan more than makes up for his friends’ silence, telling me all about his interests: he’s a potter, musician and artist. Marcel comes out onto the terrace (Reuben has outstayed his welcome and has been asked to leave, as dogs aren’t allowed upstairs in Finnbees, not unreasonably). We all make friends and I say that Marcel and I have been looking for a pottery class, and that we will attend the one he runs in Dublin. I try to pottery-splain Dan with a story about pottery from India but Dan already knows the story, so that’s nice.

We walk home in the sun back up the hill to my parents’ house on the side of Bray Head.

Thursday 30th January

The electricity is back in Galway – on our road, if not on many others – and Marcel and I head home. A freezer full of food in various stages of defrosting awaits us, and almost an entire fridge’s worth of food must be binned. However there’s a lot of fruit that’s perfectly fine, so I stew it and make a couple of cakes. There’s no way I’m ditching all those hand-picked berries – getting purple fingers and tiny splinters gathering the blackberries, and huge prickles from thorns gathering the goosebarries.

(Side note: each year, just before the gooseberries are ripe, we see the huge yellow eyes of blackbirds peering out of the gloom behind the gooseberry bushes. That is my cue to get them before the blackbirds do, but we usually don’t make a huge dent in the crop – the aforementioned thorns – and a blackbird with a gooseberry in its beak is a very cute sight.)

The next morning I am on my way to the studio, SketchPocket slung over my shoulder, but the sight of the two cakes on the countertop arrests me, and quick as a flash I have a mini-tripod set up and I am drawing the cakes and filming the process. It’s on my YouTube channel (as is the one with the chess players).

I figured the cakes would be a nice positive way to commemorate the power cut. I also wanted to do something nice for Marcel, who cleaned both freezer and fridge until they gleamed – trust me, that was well overdue.

Wednesday 5th February

Each week I travel to Dublin to my job in Enniskerry, where I have a teach a class on sketching. I love that moment when I arrive in Heuston Station on my way home to Galway, an hour early for my train, knowing all I have to do is relax until I hear the announcement about the platform number they’ve chosen. There’s a café I really love, called Brambles. The food is amazing, the cream buns like no other place. But fresh cream cakes, particularly the ones filling choux pastry buns, are my Kryptonite. I can’t eat things like that (literally as well as medically) – I had a coffee choux cream bun here once, and I was defeated after just one bite. But I can sketch them all I like and it’s curiously satisfying.

When I am finished, a member of staff comes over to take my tray. She is enchanted by my SketchPocket, and when I tell her the cactus leather comes from Mexico she is thrilled.

“I am from Mexico!” she says. “Viva México!”

It’s a lovely exchange and within a few minutes I know how long she’s been here, how much she likes Dublin (“well enough”), that her sister loves watercolour, and that she’d love a SketchPocket. Gotta love urban sketching!

Workshop in Greece April 23rd-30th

There are two places left – possibly three – for our week in Lagou Raxi, in Greece, plus travelling companions. It will be a week of capturing memories in our concertina sketchbooks, on a hill overlooking a beautiful blue bay, islands stretching out in the distance. We will stay in a gorgeous hotel in the South Pelion region – I believe it’s totally unspoiled by overtourism, being a little out-of-the-way – and we will travel each day to locations close by, concertina sketchbooks in hand, capturing our memories the slow way…if you have always wondered about your hidden artistic flair, I think this would be an amazing way to unlock it. I know I am blowing my own trumpet but my students tell me I am a good teacher. I know that I can build your confidence and skills to a point where you’ll have a whole source of joy unlocked. And I cannot emphasise that enough: I used to have what are commonly known as “mentals”, but in the thirteen years since that fateful day by the pool in Mauritius, when I started sketching what was in front of me for the first time, I have had about two truly bad days. Not two years or two months, two days.

I knew on that actual day in Mauritius that my life was about to change forever, I truly knew, and I was right. Goodness knows where that knowledge came from. I had no idea just how much it was about to change, just that it was about to change forever. Never has the phrase “invest in yourself” been more apt than when thinking about the money, time and effort you will spend on your sketching activities.

During one of my classes recently, the students were telling me about the high standard of art produced by people in Asia.

“You know why that is?” I say. “It’s because they have been taught how to draw and paint properly. That’s something that appears to have fallen out of fashion in Ireland and perhaps in other parts of the West.”

There are a few nods of agreement, and I warm to my theme.

“I have long been a bit of an outlier,” I say , “because I am extremely mean when it comes to drawing instruction. I will correct the tiniest error. But that’s because I know you have it in you to draw really well.

“My job is twofold,” I continue. “Firstly, it’s to inspire you to make art anywhere, and I mean anywhere. Secondly, it’s to share techniques with you that will make your art…well, look cool.”

So if you want to make art an integral part of your life, and make what you draw and paint look cool, then join us in Greece in Laagou Raxi this April. Here’s a link: https://lagouraxi.com/concertina-sketchbooks/

I would love to meet you!