Coffee at Zeppos
This was the one and only cityscape painting that I had ever done. I had asked a friend in South Africa for some reference pictures and this original photograph was supplied to me by his friend from Amsterdam of this beautiful restaurant called Zeppos Café. I decided that drawing a cityscape would be a huge transformation from painting landscapes.
It was the most complicated scene ever painted in my life and the longest ever painting done as it took me 47 days to complete. Every area of this scene was very challenging. The highlight of this painting was the cycle which took me a very long time. This was also one of my very few paintings where I have included human presence.
This was also the point where I shifted to a MDF (Medium Density Fiber) board to try my art which I felt was much better to use than the canvas boards as the canvas boards had rough surfaces and finer brush strokes was never possible. Also I changed the medium of use from linseed oil to Liquin original which helped the painting to dry faster overnight unlike the linseed oil which took days to dry the first coat. This was one of the unique subjects I tried during the lockdown of 2020 and it was bought in due course by my friend in South Africa even before it was completed.
