I was born in a tavern and brought up in a coffee house. The buzz of coffee houses and bars is necessary to me.

I really like and admire the drawings and coloured pencil sketches that Hockney made in Cairo in the past. The foyer of his hotel. The public spaces where you can draw without anyone bothering you, or read without distractions.

Later or earlier I got to know and love Tsarouchis’s coffee shops. They are another world. Familiar. But I have also admired and admire still the strange and unfamiliar, unknown to me as an experience, bars and coffee shops of Hopper.

When I have a resistance to painting, I take my papers and my hard pencils, type “H” and even harder, and hole up in one of the bars that I love and sketch for two or three hours. As I am doing now. Early evening at Low Profile. Maybe the lines, this time, will capture something I could not see in the beginning.

Low Profile, 30-10-2018

G.R.

* Giorgos Rorris’s “Affinity” reveals certain of his barely known visual references to figures of contemporary art, and is part of a large series of drawings by him on the theme of coffee houses, which is held in the artist’s personal archive.