This series of paintings (portraits and landscapes) capture the infamous Café Cobra, its regulars, and the lives that intersect there. Friends and neighbors appear, their stories marked by hardship, resilience, and the unexpected turns leading to tragedy. Painted after a twenty-year hiatus from oil, these works reveal Dudek’s singular fluency with brush and pigment, translating his rigor, inventiveness, and narrative layering from mixed-media collage into a strikingly immediate and refined painterly language.