Oil Painting 7 - Happy Donut Cafe

I was aware a lot of my takes on San Francisco had been big, large vistas and I wanted to start a piece that gave more day to day intimacy, that reflected the immensely rich cafe culture, and that was an interior that involved some human interaction. The Happy Donut Cafe, a 24hr budget coffee shop and bakery kindly allowed access and so we started our very own window display of painting Karen whilst she worked on the laptop plied with beakers of coffee. I liked the vantage point of being lower down than pavement level so the pedestrians strutting past would tower over us.

The American cafe paintings of Edward Hopper and his uses of the compositional device of a window in separating two worlds were a major influence on this piece.

Edward Hopper - A room in Brooklyn 1932