As art galleries have come and gone, more and more businesses have begun showing art as a regular part of their activities. Eateries, especially, have been in on this for a while and a new café on Monsarrat is making art central to its mission. HPR’s Noe Tanigawa reports.

Father and son duo, Lloyd and Kelly Sueda, have a show of works that spark conversation, on view now at ARS Cafe on Monsarrat Avenue.

"The Artwork of Kelly Sueda and Lloyd Sueda” will be on view at ARS Café on Diamond Head through September .

Those familiar with painter Kelly Sueda’s pastoral landscapes will probably be surprised by the new Hawai‘i pop images he’s been doing the last two years or so. At the Ars Café opening, with all the architects here, there are a lot of memories around the Eames chair, with foot pedestal.

“For me, it symbolizes a lot of growing up. The same with the ramen, those were the college days. I’m a big Batman fan, so it’s the Batman thing, and with the Air Jordans, it’s the first edition of the Air Jordan! So very personal things that were iconic in a sense. I’ve been hearing great stories from people about those things.”

Talk about conversation starters, Kelly’s father, Lloyd Sueda, a prominent Honolulu architect, is showing his travel sketches—and he’s been everywhere. The elder Sueda insists on two hours to sketch wherever he is and the rewards, he says, are many.

“If you sit down in front of a building like Notre Dame, and you do a sketch, you’ll never forget what it looks like. You’ll never forget what the flying buttresses look like. You’ll always remember the Seine River. You do the Arc de Triomphe, you know what it looks like, you remember the gargoyles on the building. You don’t forget!”

The elder Sueda says he has loved to draw since he was five years old and often his travel sketches are done directly in ink! He remembers one marathon day he started at 8am from the Louvre to the Obelisk, to the Arc deTriomphe, then he cut across to the Eiffel Tower, to the Seine, then Notre Dame, front and back, and got home exhilarated, thirteen hours later.

“It was one of my best days! That’s what I want to do. I’m not an artist!” But some would disagree.

His sketches are mementos—for others too!