Okay, I’ll be honest. When I first started my quest to find Seattle’s best coffee art, I wasn’t thinking acrylic or mixed media, exactly. But when the chance came to meet an actual café artist, I simply couldn’t resist.
Marsha Glazière‘s artwork is not only beautiful, culturally significant to Seattle, and historical in nature, it is quite possibly the most expansive collection of cafe paintings in the world.
The long-time resident of Seattle, who recently moved to Tacoma, has been doing interpretive landscape drawings, sketches, and paintings for a long time, but she has turned her focus to capture the unique Seattle Coffee Scene with her strikingly beautiful coffee art work.
With a coffee in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, the former University art teacher is putting the finishing touches on her upcoming book, Eclectic Coffee Spots in Puget Sound, a project four years in the making.
I recently sat down with Glazière at Fonté Café in downtown Seattle, where she detailed her passion for Seattle’s coffee culture. “Coffee shops create a sense of community, they are wonderful gathering places where people come to rub shoulders – coffee is often times the excuse,” she said.
Sometimes accompanied by her dog Ocho, she visits dozens of cafes in the region to find one that embodies what she is looking for – striking visuals, colors, and uniqueness. She will sit for hours, observing, talking to locals, taking down notes, shooting photographs, and then when the moment is right, she paints. And what amazing pieces she delivers.
She compares her work to a sociological study of sorts capturing the diversity of life in the Puget Sound. “There is a human connection at cafes that is often part of an identity,” she said. An identity she visually portrays with wonderful detail in her art.
Glazière’s book contains 41 unique paintings of cafes from region and will be out this August 2012. Certainly, her work and her passion for capturing the ambiance of cafes throughout Seattle and neighboring area is nothing short of remarkable and deserves attention.
I will keep you posted when her book becomes available. For more information, visit Marsha Glazière’s website.
