Café Olé!

Like my idol Saul Steinberg, I’m enamored of the beauty of the mundane and practical. Like him, I collect and perennially observe still life items like a paper coffee cup from City Bakery. This particular cup’s softer shade of navy blue, the way the graphics and typography integrate with its stocky form, and the deliberate cutting of the word,” Bakery” are an appealing combination. The cup is a permanent fixture on my table.

So for a new exhibit, “Coffee as Muse,” opening today, I created a series of four postcard-sized portraits of the cup, each in a different medium: cross-hatched ink, pen and ink, watercolor and colored pencil.  And I also did a small abstract painting using concentrated French Italian dark espresso.

Forty artists have contributed to this coffee-fueled and inspired show. The second annual “Coffee as Muse” runs from now through April, at No. Six Depot, a café, roaster, art gallery and cultural mecca in West Stockbridge, MA. Come see the show and have a cup of Heart of Darkness with an orange olive oil muffin.