Brian Leonard has brought tears to Julianne Moore’s eyes, swapped Instagram handles with Usher and creeped out Natalie Portman. All with espresso, stir sticks and food colouring.
The 30-year-old New Brunswick native, who goes by “Barista Brian,” is known for his “coffee caricatures” painted on top of lattes at major events. He has served the stars—from Jennifer Lawrence and Nicole Kidman to Idris Elba and Hugh Jackman—at pop-ups for one Oscars and two Emmys ceremonies, three Sundance Film Festivals, the Junos, the MMVAs, and the Canadian Screen Awards.
This month, Leonard will serve microfoam sketches to the who’s-who of Hollywood at the 44th Toronto International Film Festival. It’s his fourth time at TIFF, but it’s still a surreal experience, he told CTVNews.ca ahead of the festival.
“Having very, very famous and celebrated people celebrate what you're doing and want to take pictures of you... that is strange,” he said. “It’s latte art and it's taken me to so many different places.”
The elements of his craft are simple: a good espresso machine to produce microfoam, regular food colouring,and coffee stir sticks cut into makeshift brushes. He can sketch a person’s likeness onto the milk foam in under five minutes, which is key at TIFF’s Deadline studio at Calii Love on King Street West where celebrities file in and out for interviews, sometimes in quick succession.
It doesn't always go as planned:
“Jane Fonda, I swear, thought I was trying to poison her,” he recalled. Earlier this year, he accidentally poured a drink on someone at Sundance (he can’t recall who). When he presented "Taken" star Liam Neeson with a coffee, the actor was uninterested. “He just looked at it and shook my hand,” Leonard recalled. His depiction of Portman’s "Black Swan" performance was impressive, but she didn’t want to drink her own face. "Parks and Recreation" actress Aubrey Plaza wasn’t so sure either. “She was like ‘What is it? Do I have to touch it?’”
Most often the reactions are enthusiastic, sometimes surprisingly so: "Still Alice" Oscar-winner Moore was almost moved to tears, he said. He thinks it’s something about the “impermanence” of latte art that speaks to people. Other times it’s the personal connection. “Sometimes people just want to feel like they are seen,” he said. “Sometimes (the latte art) is as simple as me just saying ‘I see you.’”
While his craft has evolved into a full-fledged business (he incorporated as Barista Brian two years ago), it wasn’t always so polished. In the early days, when he was discovered by local Toronto media painting faces, animals and Blue Jays logos on coffee, there weren’t even any colours in his palette. As invitations to corporate events turned into Hollywood fare (including the 25th anniversary of Friends), his repertoire and abilities grew. Now he likens some of his work to “Bob Ross on milk” and uses a variety of colours on skylines and landscapes.
He’s not a studied artist and wouldn't even consider himself a painter. Instead, Leonard always wanted to be a performer. At the beginning, as his latte art garnered attention, he still sang at jazz bars in Toronto. Now he averages “a plane a week” for events, he said. It’s not what he planned, but he's still in the spotlight.
“It’s a very small thing,” he said of the art. “So to have it be blown up into a vehicle for meeting so many incredible people—it's been awesome.”
