" The dead are lucky, it's over for them."
Excerpt from a letter home in April 1943, Erwin Rommel


This was done on illustration board with acrylics, coloured pencils, synchromatic dyes and a little pastel. It is about one foot square, another piece done in 1:1 scale, an attempt to add to it's realism.
Some time back I painted a series of coffee cups. With some of them I had some fun and wove a bit of my passion for history into them. This one depicts a last coffee enjoyed by Rommel in North Africa, end of May, 1943. Rommel had coffee every morning, wrote his wife Lu a letter and studied the war situatuion. The details on the map, noting his enemies positions, his petroleum stores and consumption rates and likely options for retreat, reveal the unenviable circumstances he and his charges found themselves in at the end of the Afrikan Korp's campaign.
A Q-tip and the pastel was used to create the steam spiralling up from the cup. Sandpaper was employed to imitate the wood grain atop of the ammunition crate.