The Art of the Coffee House

Coffee houses and art. Normally, that combination conjures up a bunch of people in black berets, sipping cappucinos and talking about how the existentialism of their art reflects the existentialism of their existence. Not too consistent with the reality of triple skinny lattes to go, but still there you are. Something about the walls of a really great coffee house really cries out to be decorated by the latest up and coming local artist.

I work at Perks. Journalistic integrity requires I disclose this. And it also explains why I spend so much time thinking about this sort of thing. All those hours of standing behind the counter, staring at the back wall where the art hangs have me contemplating what makes truly great coffee house art, and what role it plays in our fair city.

Perks switches things up on a fairly regular basis, every few months or so, and right now their art wall evokes the bucolic, with oil paintings of doe eyed cows and goats and tree dotted landscapes of local artist Andrea Tomasovsky. Pretty mild fare, as far as art goes, but the bold colors and brush strokes are striking. All employee loyalty aside, I'd have to say Perks does pretty well in meeting all the art in a coffee house requirements.

Yes, there are requirements.

Coffee houses, and restaurants, and any other establishment that sells art, do great things, not only for the artist who wants to display their work, but also for their patrons, who get a little something out of the ordinary every time they glance around them. So coffee house art, I venture to say, has to strike a balance between the needs of these two groups. It must be interesting, sure--no snooze-fest hotel room seascapes, please--but it must also, ahem, lean towards the middle. Just as no true art (or coffee house) aficionado wants to have to spend his or her time gazing at generic prints of coffee cups, no ordinary cup-of-joer wants to eat their morning muffin while looking at Piss Christ. The goal of a coffee house art show is to please the eye, and reflect the local art scene.

I decided to check out the landscape, see what the other caffiene proprietors were putting on their walls. After quickly establishing that neither CC's nor Starbucks has much on their walls but paint, I began visiting the old local standbys.

First came a stop at Highland Coffees. If Perks is the neighborhood coffee shop, Highland is the LSU flagship, and its art reflects that. Like Perks, Highland usually only shows one artist at a time--currently it's a display of black and white portraits, by Amy James. James plays with light and shadow in her photographs, and even the happiest ones have something a little dark about them. Not bad.

Next there was Brew Ha Ha. Brew Ha Ha shares a strip mall with not one but two art galleries, and every possible inch of peach colored wall is covered in paintings and drawings, not to mention the jewelry by the counter, the small collection of miniature metal sculptures and wood carvings from the Katrina wood project. Brew Ha Ha's aesthetic appears to be a bit of anything goes; a painting pair of cupcakes with lit candles shares a wall with striking nightscape highlighted with bold reds and golds. It's not quite something for everyone--serious art junkies may be left cold when encountering, say, the framed sketch of Tiger Stadiumâ€"but the remarkable variety surely says something about the number of artists living and working in the area.

The final stop on my journey is Charlie's Coffee, mecca of the late night cram session (it's open until 2 a.m. weeknights during the semester). The work Charlie's shows is as haphazard as its arrangement on the walls, and the large amount of locally themed art on the walls make it a pretty good bet that most of Charlie's featured artists are also LSU students. There's a graphite drawing of a corner in downtown Baton Rouge (prominently featuring a Subway), a water color of the parade grounds at LSU, and some nice oil paintings of downtown, and even a geometric take on the letters LSU.

After Charlie's, my trip came to rather an abrupt halt. I have to say, Baton Rouge coffee shops do a pretty good job of representing a decent section of artists, both local and regional, both first time and established. It does leave me wondering though: what are we missing? A college town of this size surely could fill at least a couple more coffee places, with some pretty good stuff--maybe something edgier, or something geared specifically towards families. In an ideal world, we'd have filled all kinds of public spaces with art a long time ago, but in reality, Baton Rouge remains an up and comer, still figuring out where it fits in, what it wants to look like.