Featured Artist

When her first opportunity arose to take a photography class her junior year in high school, Emily Penn leaped at the chance to delve into her longtime passion.

There, a photography teacher saw real promise and mentored the teenager and her penchant for camera work.

When Penn graduated in 2008 from the University of North Texas with a visual arts degree, she immediately hoped to share her photographic collection with the world. Her opportunities to showcase her art were limited, however. She waits tables in a Denton restaurant and in a Lewisville restaurant.

But her work has found a home on the walls of Café Du Luxe, Denton’s newest and most exciting bistro. An entire wall of the café is dedicated solely for featuring some of the Greater Dallas-Fort Worth area’s brightest and most exciting artists.

“It’s a really nice venue for hanging my art,” said Penn, 22, referring to the large wall space.

Featured art is displayed monthly with a “meet the artist” night on the third Sunday evening of the month. Penn was selected as the November artist. Three other artists have had monthly showings, J. Lynn Kelly, Scott Focke and Joan Hart. Penn is the first to showcase her talents through photography.

Penn said she has always been interested in the visual, partly due to her interest in her father’s job as an architect. It was an easy transition to photography.

“The mind has the freedom to pick and perceive reality in its own way,” Penn said. “A camera, however, interprets spatial reality and records it as a two-dimensional image resembling the actual location.

“An unaltered photograph represents a single point perspective of a space while the human eye can observe the same space and create a three-dimensional manifestation in the mind.”

Through her photographs, Penn said, she is reconciling the difference between her personal memories and a camera’s visual memory.

One of her recent series is My Mind’s Eye, is a visual interpretation of memories of specific locations that Penn frequently visits or notices.

“Even though I am a photographer, my memories do not resemble photographs,” Penn said. “My objective, in visually communicating my memories, is influenced by certain aspects of cubism such as the reconstruction of a subject from more than one perspective.”

In My Mind’s Eye, Penn said she uses the computer as an instrument to merge photographs from various angles “to allow a two-dimensional medium, such as photography, to represent multiple vantage points.” These were created through PhotoShop manipulation.

Cuisine

The Café Du Luxe menu features breakfast pastries, sandwiches, salads, soups, evening appetizers and decadent desserts. Breakfast pastries are baked on site daily. Salads, sandwiches and evening appetizers are made to order, not pre-packaged. Customers say the artisan bread alone is worth a trip to Café Du Luxe. For those who abstain from meat, Café Du Luxe offers a Veggie Sandwich: fresh romaine, ripe tomatoes, zesty red onion and sliced tomato topped with sprouts and served with cream cheese.

Tea

Café Du Luxe is pleased to present a wide selection of Numi Organic Teas. Cafe Du Luxe also features “Numi’s Leaves of Art” hand-sewn and handcrafted flowering tea line. Handpicked premium white tea buds, top two green tea leaves, select Oolong leaves or golden-tipped black tea are hand-sewn around flowers into bundles or rosettes by artisans in China. When steeped in hot water, these rare “Leaves of Art” slowly blossom into a bouquet of breathtaking shapes and exquisite flavors. Flavors available at Cafe Du Luxe include golden jasmine and lavender dream.

Coffee

Cafe Du Luxe café manager Sarah Vaughn is pleased to announce that two holiday specialty beverages are available. The head barista said the first is a Pumpkin Pie Latte that features DaVinci syrup. The other is a Peppermint Mocha that features Ghirardelli chocolate and DaVinci peppermint syrup. Both drinks tie in with the upcoming holidays,” Sarah said. “They’re also warm and cozy.” Café Du Luxe uses only Italy’s finest espresso machines and grinders by La Marzocco. Traditional brewed coffee drinkers can choose from light roast, darker roast and decaffeinated coffees from opening to closing every day. The beans are specially roasted and packaged for Café Du Luxe and are available for purchase in one pound packages.

Desserts

The desserts at Café Du Luxe will satisfy the most discriminating palates. A coffee house favorite is the New York Supreme Cheesecake: a grand cheesecake on a graham cracker crust. Looking for something that sounds as well as tastes rich? Go for the 24K Carrot Cake. You’ll get four big layers of carrot cake with butter cream cheese icing, finished with chopped walnuts.

Wine

Are you In a celebratory mood? Café Du Luxe is now offering a holiday Champagne. Lamarca, a prosecco, is a product of Italy and seems to be popular with jazz aficionados who enjoy the jazz music that is featured at the café on occasion. Café Du Luxe also serves wines for every palate, including its specialty wines. Café Du Luxe offers four tiers of wine: House, Featured, Specialty and Private Reserve. All wines except the house wines are available for purchase by the bottle. There’s truly something for everyone. You can get a $5 house wine or go all the way up to their most expensive, the Beaulieu Vineyard: BV Tapestry, which sells for $105 a bottle.