Cafe Cosme

Cosme is my unofficial name.  I gave myself the name following seeing it in a novel I read about medieval Spain (in Spanish, of course).  After I picked the name for myself I looked up it's meaning on the internet and here is what I found:

People with this name have a deep inner desire to inspire others in a higher cause, and to share their own strongly held views on spiritual matters.           
People with this name tend to initiate events, to be leaders rather than followers, with powerful personalities. They tend to be focused on specific goals, experience a wealth of creative new ideas, and have the ability to implement these ideas with efficiency and determination. They tend to be courageous and sometimes aggressive. As unique, creative individuals, they tend to resent authority, and are sometimes stubborn, proud, and impatient.

That is me to a T.  This afternoon I am hanging out in Café Cosme.  I finished work at the ridiculously early hour of 2 in the afternoon and thought of spending an hour or two inside a café with my sketchbook.  Then I recalled that I had already spent time in two different cafes today and this is getting expensive.  Following a stroll in the outlandishly wealthy neighbourhood of Shaughnessy I took the bus home, made a pot of cocoa and relaxed with it in my recliner chair with my sketchbook on my lap while listening to classical music (the Mozart Requiem and Charpentier's Te Deum, if you must know).  There is a multisensual beauty to this that would not happen inside a coffee shop.  I use fair trade cocoa and play the Mozart Requiem while making it from scratch, using butter, brown sugar, cocoa powder, milk and vanilla extract.  Later the Charpentier Te Deum comes on, a masterpiece of the French Baroque.  Then I pour the cocoa into a beautiful cocoa pot I purchased in Mexico and pour it into my gorgeous Laurel Burch mug which I was given twenty-four years ago as a gift from the women I was in Christian Community with.



As I said, with the beautiful music, the lovely pottery, the flavour and fragrance of freshly made cocoa (fair trade and benefitting those who produce the product) and the developing drawing on my knee (a golden pheasant.  Check the image)



I've somewhat exaggerated the size of the ruff as though he is expanding it for display.

As I said, it is a multisensual experience. 

The only handicap to doing the art at home is the lack of contact with the public.  Even when no one seems to comment or notice my art I know it is being noticed, perhaps criticized, perhaps admired, and while I do not do this for attention or for compliments I do my drawing in cafes as a kind of offering to the public, a way of sharing my life with others.

But sometimes I have to give priority to my budget and the rapidly shrinking money in my wallet.  And to enjoy the peace and quiet of home.