This is Christina Materdomini, long time bartender at Scarpetta, the restaurant where I worked from 2017-2023. Like so many restaurant “concepts” within hotels this Scarpetta had been coming to its planned conclusion and retirement at about the same time I photographed this scene in its kitchen. I had been slogging through a very detailed and large draft for the months preceding and decided that this project might be a welcome respite. I also thought of it as my farewell to Scarpetta. The attitude on display here captures some of the general “Oh yeah?! Well get a load of this!” sentiment of exasperation that was wide spread throughout the staff at the time.

I think what you call this is a generation thing. My wife Marsha calls it a “Looky.” Christina and many others call it “Seefood” (“See…Food!”) Christina is going through the ritual any server will recognize: “it’s been a while; where is my food?” It is late at night and she is engaging in the kind of scavenging that most workers resort to as their hunger at the end of long shift gets the better of them. She is eating a stray piece of ciabatta. My coworkers are kind of used to me and know how to spot me when I try to take candid photos of them. Christina and Luis, the food runner smirking behind her realize I am there very quickly on; but Christina chose to lean into the moment - quite literally.

Brittney Thomas, my long time coworker and service partner at Scarpetta is fond of saying that, “If Gill wants to draw a picture of you - and you are not paying him to do it - beware! It’s going to come out ugly!” Maybe she is on to something. When I first took this photo I was very entertained by the extreme, almost mask like facial grimace. It’s funny to me, because I know Christina does not usually look like this. But then I started to look at the composition and realized there might be something more. The carriage of her arms creates a nice right angled counterpoint to the head turned to the side. The extreme black of Christina’s uniform meant that her scoped out neck line would create an even wider eclipse with her face. Of course, this is a candid cell phone pic. And like most cell phone cameras mine tends to go for the wide angle view. If one looks at the outtakes you will notice that the proportions of Christina’s body closest to me start to get exaggerated in the photos of her closest to me. This is why her hands seem small and her shoes so large. BTW as I was working on this I began to see a kind of mermaid tail shape in the shoe position and the legs pressed close together.

I had spent an extraordinary amount of time reproducing details in my previous project, Kevin and Kaylie. The circumstances of that project meant that my draft was blown up by only 135%. For this drawing I reverted back to my usual enlargement of the draft to 200%. This meant that many abstract, rough shapes would again creep into the assemblage. The lines of the face were details that did not really lend themselves  to this effect. The face was also a bit rough in execution. For some reason I did not feel the need to oversaturate every value. Perhaps my favorite part of the way the drawing turned out is the effects of the intense kitchen lights on the black uniform. The clothing remains very dark. I mean VERY dark. But the clothing in the photo was even darker. I spent a good deal of time producing over exposed versions of this photo so I could piece together the precise relative darknesses of this seemingly uniform black clothing. In this I think I was successful.