The Cafe Series
(or, The Barista at the End of the World)
What are these café paintings about, exactly?
Well, they began—like so many odd chapters in life do—just as the world was ending. Or at least thinking quite seriously about it. Maybe a few days before, depending on how you count. The first painting in what would become the Café Series started as a sketch I dashed off in February of 2020, while lounging in my favourite local café. The room was comfortably crowded, the coffee hot, the muffins gloriously overbaked, and somewhere—disturbingly far but ominously real—there were murmurs of an outbreak in China.
It wasn’t until the world snapped shut like a clam (or a government health directive) that I looked at that sketch again and felt a wave of unsettling nostalgia for something as simple, and suddenly as fragile, as sitting in a café. Thus Café Memories was born: a painting steeped in the wistfulness of warm spaces, idle chatter, and the terrifying question, Was I ever going to enjoy a muffin in public again?
When lockdowns eventually eased (or at least softened into a kind of bureaucratic shrug), I returned to my café. Or what was left of it. The baked goods were still warm, but the cozy atmosphere had been replaced by plexiglass barriers, floor stickers, and a circus tent outside with picnic tables that seemed only vaguely aware they were now part of the service industry. It was earnest, it was valiant—but it was a bit weird.
As I stood in line, waiting my turn like a compliant extra in a post-apocalyptic British sci-fi film, something caught my eye. There, through the warped reflections of the plexiglass and the canvas flaps of the café tent, stood the barista. She was slumped behind the counter in a pose of pure existential fatigue. And in that moment, I had a jolt of déjà vu—not just of cafés past, but of Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
It was uncanny.
Naturally, I whipped out my phone (no time for a sketch—this was wartime art-making) and asked if I could take a photo. The barista, probably grateful for a reason to pause her routine of sanitizing the milk frother for the 117th time that hour, nodded. She didn’t pose, not exactly—but somehow she struck the precise, weary, enigmatic posture of Manet’s famous barmaid. Thus began Café Lockdown, a painting filled with masked echoes and hidden tributes. Look closely and you might spot a few Easter eggs in the background—my little nod to Manet’s masterpiece, filtered through the cracked lens of 2020.
Other paintings followed. Some captured the claustrophobic energy of crowded circus tents pretending to be outdoor cafés. Others tried to evoke the alienation of human beings trying very hard to connect while breathing through three layers of fabric and mild panic.
The Café Series became a kind of love letter—not just to the cafés themselves, but to what they represented: community, small comforts, the simple joy of people-watching while your muffin cools. Things we didn’t know we’d miss until they were suddenly—and bizarrely—gone.
