Ottawa man turning disposable coffee cups into works of art

A local artist is treating disposable coffee cups as canvases for his paintings of Ottawa.

On Sunday, Tomas Pajdlhauser hosted an art show at Citizen restaurant on Gilmour Street, showing off 100 disposable coffee cups for sale, each featuring a unique illustration of an Ottawa winter scene.

“This is something that I’ve been doing for a while, drawing on coffee cups here and there,” he said.

Pajdlhauser, who works for an animation studio in Ottawa, said he spends a lot of his time observing and sketching scenery, often taking trips out of town to find inspiration for his sketchbook illustrations.

He also owns a skateboard shop with a cafe – Birling Skateboard Shop – and promotes the shop’s coffee on Instagram by drawing on disposable cups. That’s where he said he got the idea to create 100 pieces of art, all featured on coffee cups.

“The reason I did so many is because they are very small. It’s a 12 ounce coffee cup, so you do really have to pick it up and hold it in your hand and twist it, and look at it to really appreciate it,” he said.

In order to give the cups weight and rigidity, the cups were filled with marbles and bondo – a type of putty filler – according to Pajdlhauser. They were also topped with baltic birch lids and varnished for preservation.

When Pajdlhauser originally set out to design the coffee cup art, he said he was essentially “spending a lot of time drawing on a piece of garbage and selling a piece of garbage.” He then got feedback on how to improve the design from friends and now, he said, the cups are “ nice hardened, weighted, finished, preserved piece[s].”

In terms of the artwork, each coffee cup painting was drawn “on site” at various locations across the city, he said.

Pajdlhauser has been touring around Ottawa for the last few months, observing scenes and converting them into small coffee cup-sized illustrations. Some of the illustrations include renditions of the James Street Pub, the Chinatown archway, and the spider-like Maman statue outside of the National Gallery of Canada.

“This whole show is basically my experience this winter in Ottawa,” he said. “I think I can say safely that it’s a very depressing and not very active time of year for a lot of people. So what I wanted to do was celebrate what’s beautiful about it.”