Lee An­na Ma­haraj

leean­na.ma­haraj@guardian.co.tt

Lap­tops and cof­fee cups are com­mon­place at cafés, but at one lo­cal cof­fee house, a man’s work­space is cov­ered with pen­cils, pa­pers and sketch­es.

Al­most every morn­ing, Trinida­di­an-Cana­di­an artist Mal­colm Charles can be found at Star­bucks’ Trinci­ty Plaza branch, where he has trans­formed a spot in­to his art stu­dio away from home.

“This is like my sec­ond home. I call this my of­fice, be­cause I get a lot of space. My apart­ment, it’s kind of white. I have white coun­ter­tops, white tile floor­ing, white cup­boards. So, work­ing there would be a lot of cleanups. And I just like the at­mos­phere here [at Star­bucks]. I’m mak­ing a lot of con­nec­tions here too, so it’s a good mar­ket­ing tool for me,” Charles ex­plained.

Charles said it has been about four years since he re­turned to Trinidad and be­gan us­ing Star­bucks as a work­space. Dur­ing that time, he said the staff have nev­er made an is­sue of the hours he spends work­ing there.

Orig­i­nal­ly from Ch­agua­nas, Charles mi­grat­ed to Toron­to, Cana­da, at just eight years old, but he al­ways felt his roots call­ing him back.

“I just want­ed to find out where I came from. You know, when you won­der about who your fam­i­ly is. I got to know rel­a­tives that I haven’t seen in years, so I just want­ed to dis­cov­er the roots again, and I like that the weath­er is a bit bet­ter down here,” Charles said.

A chef by pro­fes­sion, Charles has al­ways had a deep con­nec­tion with art.

“You know, some peo­ple are born math­e­mat­i­cal­ly in­clined, I was just nat­u­ral­ly good with art. So as far as I can re­mem­ber, I start­ed draw­ing comics, kept draw­ing and grad­u­al­ly got bet­ter and bet­ter,” he re­called.

For some time, his spe­cial­i­ty was stip­pling, which in­volved en­grav­ing dots to cre­ate im­ages. How­ev­er, in more re­cent times, he found him­self drawn to a new­er craft.

“This is char­coal. With char­coal pen­cils, there are dif­fer­ent grades like high­er, medi­um and soft.

I get dif­fer­ent shades, dif­fer­ent tones, dif­fer­ent val­ues. I was kind of scared to use char­coal, but be­cause I fol­low a lot of artists on­line, I thought, wow how do you do that? So, I went on YouTube, and start­ed learn­ing how to do tu­to­ri­als and train my­self,” he shared.

Al­though Charles is self-taught and picks things up eas­i­ly, he ad­mits that some of his sketch­es take a lot out of him, as one sketch can take be­tween 30 to 100 hours to com­plete, due to the amount of de­tail put in­to it.

“What I do is on the verge of pho­to­re­al­ism and hy­per­re­al­ism. It’s sup­posed to ba­si­cal­ly mim­ic look­ing like a pho­to­graph. I found char­coal, or even black and white, is a bet­ter con­trast. I see more con­trast in char­coal. The clash of it is like dark light, which is like good and evil,” he re­flect­ed.

Charles’ work in­cludes por­traits of no­table fig­ures such as Bri­an Lara, Tu­pac Shakur, Drake and Bob Mar­ley. While he cur­rent­ly works as a chef at 277 Restau­rant, he hopes to pur­sue art full-time.

“I’m try­ing to get artists that I’ve been in con­tact with to form like a lit­tle con­glom­er­ate and do work­shops, maybe help out schools with kids that want to do art and or of­fer a pro­gramme where they can come af­ter school and learn what­ev­er they need to learn in art,” he ex­plained.

For now, Charles re­mains at Star­bucks, amus­ing passers-by.

“At first when I saw him, I didn’t re­alise what he was do­ing, it’s on­ly af­ter I did. You know, you usu­al­ly come to Star­bucks and just mind your busi­ness, but then I saw his stuff and I re­alised this is amaz­ing,” said Brit­ney Nurse.

The 28-year-old lawyer from Trinci­ty was al­so us­ing the café as her work-from-home space.

“In some way it ac­tu­al­ly tends to make work­ing here more re­lax­ing, but al­so it en­cour­ages you to come and do any type of work, cause some peo­ple like me would come to work from home, so they’re busy be­hind their com­put­er, but you don’t re­al­ly see artists, painters, draw­ers, so I think it en­cour­ages dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties and pro­fes­sions,” she ex­plained.

Forty-two-year-old Pas­tor Jean-Paul Ram­jat­tan from Ch­agua­nas said he fre­quents Star­bucks week­ly for his work as well and is al­ways im­pressed by Charles’ work.

“It was un­usu­al, be­cause you don’t re­al­ly see artists prac­tis­ing their craft like this, but I would say it was in­spir­ing too, be­cause of the ded­i­ca­tion and you could see the re­sults of his work. It is in­spir­ing and mo­ti­vat­ing in a way, be­cause while every­one will be be­hind lap­tops and you can’t re­al­ly see what they’re work­ing on, but when you can see his work,” he shared.

For 29-year-old ge­o­g­ra­ph­er Tyrell Git­tens, it was his first time see­ing Charles in his el­e­ment.

“I think what he’s do­ing is a great con­ver­sa­tion starter, be­cause it’s my first time see­ing his art­work, and it caught my at­ten­tion. So, I went across and spoke to him for a lit­tle bit, and got an idea of what he’s do­ing. You know, giv­en the glob­al cli­mate with ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, it’s al­so good to see re­al artists, re­al peo­ple cre­at­ing and draw­ing stuff in re­al life,” he said.