The painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel gives today's artists an understanding of what art was
during the Renaissance period. Michelangelo's saints give testimony to an age where an artist
would dedicate years of his life to perfecting one masterpiece. In today's fast-paced society,
art has taken on a new face.
Quick quiz… Which place downtown is most indicative of where art
is heading?
a) The Firehouse Gallery (Anybody see the collage-on-glass piece that someone made out
of teeny holes punched out of magazines? Now there's a good way to use your back-issues
of Hullaballoo!)
b) The bathroom at The Metronome (there are some really thought-provoking cartoons
scrawled on the stall walls..)
c) The Liquid Energy Café (It's free to get in and there's a fine array of graphic art
displayed on the walls.)
Though the first two choices may give a great view into what's happening deep in the minds of
today's artists, the last is the topic of my choice… (Maybe next month I'll do some investigative
reporting in the Metronome's bathroom.)
The Liquid Energy Café, one of the most colorful additions to the Church Street strip, pulses
like a giant neon sign over the surrounding buildings. Glen Cohen, one of the three café owners,
has lent his graphic art background to designing the business. The place began as an idea that
moved from paper to computer screen, then, finally after a lot of manual labor (ripping apart the
place to stir up the ghost of Shiloh's café and expose a beautiful, brick wall). The Liquid Energy
Cafe finally took shape. "I think it gives Burlington a bit of a face lift, Church St especially,"
Cohen says.
He and his cousin, Rick Drazin, moved to town last summer, hoping to create a hullaballoo by
setting up a juice bar, something Burlington had never before experienced. "As a world and people we're heading into a new time, the year 2000…We wanted to play a little
on that in designing the place, come up with a mod, hip type of atmosphere." Cohen achieved this
atmosphere by designing the juice bar to resemble the Starship Enterprise.
Surrounded by chrome-accented countertops and hovering, silver t.v. screens, customers may feel
they've left the hustle of Church St. behind and entered another dimension. The whirring of the blenders
adds to the feeling that the ship is preparing for takeoff. Before settling on the "space age" motif,
Cohen experimented with many other designs. "I have files upon files of ideas for this place…" he reflects, "some completely out there, some
more conservative."
One of his more "out there" ideas would have inevitably been appreciated by "Gilligans' Island"
fans. "An idea I had was to create an oasis with more of a Hawaiian type of feeling," says Cohen,
"Building everything out of palm, bamboo and wood… palm leaves hanging over, creating awnings. Then
we'd throw beach sand down! The entire floor would be a foot of beach sand. The employees would walk
around in tanktops and sandals. Something like that I thought would be different here. You see it a lot
on the West Coast…"
This idea was ruled out. The closest thing to sand you'll find at the Liquid Energy Café are the
powdered herbs that settle like fine dust over the chrome countertops. Ginseng, Ginko Biloba and
Caffeine are just a few of the "enhancements" the café offers to energize and rejuvinate smoothie
drinkers. Cohen remembers fondly, the moment the first bulk-sized bag of caffeine arrived….
"Some of us were downstairs pouring it into a container. The fine powder rose in a cloud to
surround our heads…We all were breathing it in. For the rest of the day I was totally wired."
Upon calling the company that produced the caffeine, he learned that it needed to be handled with
Great Respect… small doses go a looong way.
But Cohen obviously doesn't need a caffeine kick to give him motivation. Art, perhaps his greatest
motivation, has taken him far from home. A native of South Africa, he crossed the ocean and
moved to California to attend San Diego State University for Graphic Art. After working at
an ad agency, he abandoned his West Coast lifestyle to move to Vermont and start The Liquid
Energy Café. Though it isn't the Sistine Chapel, the café is a fruit-inspired celebration of
graphic art.
And graphic art seems to be where art as a whole is heading as we approach the turn of the
century. Sculpture, painting, drawing, mediums that require a skill-full hand and more than a little
patience, will these be lost in the high-speed computer age?
"Graphic art and fine art are two completely different fields," Cohen notes, "They're like two
branches of a tree, really. They do merge at some point. If I took somebody's painting and scanned it
then it's something generated by hand but it's being produced on the computer. The computer has
become such a dominant tool in the work-field because time is money." And as Cohen so frankly points
out, "The 'starving artist'…There's something romantic about that expression, but at the same time,
although money's not everything it certainly helps."
Though Cohen is now a graphic artist, he is no stranger to the finer, "more tranquil" side of art.
"Sitting in front of a computer screen isn't very tranquil," he laughs, "I'd love to be able to throw up
canvas and start painting. It's a great way of expressing emotions."
Right now art for him is business as usual… "For the past four or five years all my art has become
graphic design. It's turned electronic. Most of my work in design now is pretty computer generated."
…But there was a time in his life he slung paint around like a Michelangelo strung out on caffeine.
"Growing up, I painted my bedroom wall every few months, I'd paint a mural. I'd work with
different mediums; charcoal, watercolor, a little bit of oil. I'd like to pick that up again one day."
Until then, Cohen will keep mass-producing posters of computer generated carrots, faster than
Andy Warhol painted cans of Campbell's soup. An entire wall of the café is devoted to Cohen's
artwork, each poster crackling with electric colors; kiwi greens, bursts of plum and tangerine.
He also designs t-shirts with Liquid's logo on them, hats, plastic "sippy" cups and glass juice jugs
in the spirit of the old fashioned milk bottles!
Although in the past the Artist and the Money haven't associated with one another, graphic art
seems to be redefining the artist…bringing him further away from the "starving artist" cliché and
placing him in, say, The Liquid Energy Café. And Cohen would like to share the juice with local
artists. "I would like to allocate a small area in the café for artist's work." he says. "I've been
approached about it enough where I definitely would work something out. I'd like to do it for
summertime."
At the Liquid Energy Café, smoothies are served fresh, sweet and chock full of herbal
enhancements, guaranteed to get those creative juices flowing. Try the "HuLLaBaLLoo,
" I hear it's simply smashing.
