Cafe Nero - 3rd June 2006

Today did not go well. When I started these cafe sketches I found the experience liberating. It got me out of my little back bedroom, away from obsessive self portraits and broke my tendency to try to produce finished drawings before I was getting the basics of proportion right.

But increasingly the feeling of liberation and the elation I often feel at the end of a successful trip is becoming replaced by frustration. It's not that I can't see any progress, if I look back at the drawings from my first trip at the beginning of February this year, I can see that the drawings are much stronger now.

But I want more. I want someone to draw who sits still for at least ten minutes at a time, a model who gives me a chance to stretch my ability to judge shapes and their relationships correctly. In the beginning I enjoyed the challenge of trying to catch someone in a few minutes much more, now I get more and more wound up by people moving before I can finish, getting up to leave, other people sitting in my line of sight so I can't see my model any more and can't finish the drawing. Perhaps I'm allowing these things to wind me up too much, I know by now that that's just the way it is drawing in cafes, only one out of ten will be a good drawing that I'm happy with, if I'm lucky.

For some reason today I found it even more frustrating than usual. I'm considering stopping the cafe sketches and looking for another form of drawing from life that allows me just a little more time, more of a chance to judge the shapes and lines, to stretch my ability to see. I'm putting up all the drawings from today, finished or not, to show what's making me feel this way now.

What can I say about this drawing? Obviously it's a complete failure. The guy left before I could get much of him drawn, and the little I did get done is hopelessly out of proportion and poorly observed. I felt constricted today, like I couldn't make the connection between my eye and my hand, couldn't get the lines to flow.

The first drawing from a cafe trip is often a bit dodgy whilst I get warmed up, but this one is especially bad. I feel like I haven't learned anything at all for all my trips to the cafe.

I know I shouldn't get wound up by this kind of thing, that it has to be accepted that these conditions are far from ideal for drawing, and that the challenge is part of the fun. It's been that way until recently. But I'm beginning to feel that I'm stagnating, that I'm not moving on and that I'm not learning as much as I was when I first started sketching in the cafe.

Second drawing. Ordinarily I don't try to draw kids, they bounce around too much for my relatively untrained eye and weak visual memory to get the shapes right. But for some reason, I was having trouble finding anyone I wanted to draw today. Most likely it's just me, and not that today there was a dearth of interesting enough people who would sit still enough for me to get a reasonable drawing done.

It's a pretty sad comment that this is the best drawing from today's trip. It's in no way a likeness and the shapes and proportions are badly observed. His hand is completely misshapen, his head is wrong and his neck is too long. Also, this drawing was much better half way through than it is now. After a few minutes when I'd got everything blocked in, I decided that I could improve on the profile of his face and re-drew it. Bad idea, it came out worse than my first attempt. Sometimes you just have to know when to let a drawing alone, and today I was getting that badly wrong. It's disappointing that the drawing is out of proportion, but it's even more disappointing that it was more in proportion before I decided to 'improve' it. Not good.

Another disappointing drawing. This one is a good case in point of what's frustrating me so much about drawing in the cafe now. This guy had a great profile with a sharply sloped forehead, a strong, hooked nose and dark, well defined eyebrows, he looked almost like a hawk, I would have loved to be able to do a proper portrait of him.

But before I could get to his profile, someone, a very large someone, sat down directly in my line of sight and I couldn't see his face anymore. Really I should have left the drawing alone at that point, but I tried to fill in his profile from memory and came nowhere near. I wrecked the drawing.

Perhaps it was just a bad day today, perhaps I just wasn't on the ball enough to get any decent drawings from the trip, certainly it's happened enough times before. But as the morning went by I got more and more frustrated both with the difficulty I was having finding someone interesting and still enough to draw, and by my patent inability to get anything right today. Frustration is not a good state of mind for drawing. My best drawings are usually characterised by a relaxed feeling, like they almost draw themselves and I don't have to try. Today I was trying very hard, and my mounting frustration is visible to me in the drawings. Every misplaced line seemed to make the next one worse and every drawing ran further and further away from me.

Well, I suppose my frustration is pretty evident in this one, the last one for today. The woman just would not sit still, which was a shame because she had a very interesting face, again I would have liked to do a proper portrait of her. The drawing just ran further and further away from me until finally I scribbled over it, grabbed my kit and slouched off home like a sulking teenager.

I decided on the way home that this was to be my last cafe sketching trip, at least for a while, and that I wasn't learning anything any more. What I need now, or what I want anyway, is to have at least ten or fifteen minutes with someone actually sitting still enough to give me a chance to produce a half decent drawing. I hate putting up work like this on the site, I hate failing publicly.

But it's not the people's fault, it's me. It's all too easy to lay the blame for my own shortcomings elsewhere, but it doesn't help me in the long run. Over the last four months I've done just over eighty of these drawings, well, over a hundred more like since not all of them get posted, and out of all those drawings there's been some quite nice ones, and even one or two that I'm proud of. So if I could do it before, why couldn't I do it today? I've had bad trips before when I haven't been able to produce a single good drawing, but I haven't considered giving up doing them before.

All the same, I do feel the need for more stationary models now, for longer poses, for a slightly more controlled drawing environment. If I'm honest with myself, a lot of the reason I didn't do so well today is that I haven't been drawing as much recently and I'm off the boil. There's a number of reasons for that, every last one of them a weak excuse. I know this stuff is hard work. I know it takes years to achieve any kind of reasonable level of competence, and I know I shouldn't let the challenges get to me like this. I'll see how I feel next week, but I may take a break from the cafe for a while. But only as long as I can find something similar to take it's place.

A portrait artist I have a lot of respect for recently posted an excellent idea on an online forum I frequent: Set up somewhere public with an easel and offer quick portraits for free. I like that idea, although of course the thought of just setting up in the street and putting myself on the line is somewhat nerve-wracking. The usual fear of failure. But I felt that way about the cafe sketches when I started them, and for someone like me, who copied old master paintings on the streets for the best part of ten years, it should hold no great horrors. I like the idea a lot, because even if the poses are only held for ten minutes, that's more than I'm getting now in the cafe. I still feel the need for some practice at quick portraits before I do it though, so maybe I'll see if I can persuade Michelle to sit for some quick timed poses for me and see what happens. If they don't come out a complete mess they may give me the confidence to get out there and give it a try.

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