Most drawings start with a blank sheet. Alba’s start with an empty cup. When the coffee is finished, the grounds stay on the white walls of the cup in patches, ridges and drips. She looks at them the way other people look at clouds, and waits until something looks back.
In her own words: “My work begins with simple acts: boiling water, listening, watching forms appear. From hours, structure comes.”
Three stages, one drawing
Every drawing on this site went through the same three stages, and Alba photographs each of them. First the cup: the grounds as they dried. Then the line: a graphite drawing of the forms she found, often hours of hatching and small circles. Then the colour: coloured pencil laid over the graphite until the sheet is finished and signed with the date.
Art of Fulfilled Life is the clearest example. In the cup there is a band of grounds across the middle, like a crowd walking. In the graphite version that band becomes a procession of beaked figures carrying chains of beads. In the colour version they are blue, green, yellow and black, still walking in the same direction as the grounds.
Not fortune telling
Reading coffee grounds is an old custom in many countries, usually to look for signs about the future. Alba’s practice borrows the looking, not the predicting. What she reads in the cup is form: a figure leaving a flock, a shore meeting a wave, a face inside a leaf.
The meaning comes afterwards, and she leaves room for yours. On one of her posts she wrote: “You do not need to see what I see. Be free to interpret.”
Why the stages matter
Seeing the cup next to the finished drawing changes how the drawing reads. The colour version is not invented from nothing; it is a record of attention. Every work page on this site shows the stages when Alba photographed them, so you can follow the same path from the grounds to the colour.
