Don’t pet this kitty! There’s something special about black cats, and this illustration for The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, about a witch who turns into a black cat and glowers at the world, is one of my favourites. I love the robust and expressive pen and ink technique, and the way the cat simply radiates power and anger.
The white angora cat will have none of that brushing business thanks very much! I like the small details in this painting: the dog in the bottom left corner, the servant woman in the shadow behind the door, and the eerie reflections of the other people in the room.
The painting shows Julie Manet, the daughter of fellow artists Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, and her kitten who seems to be so blissed out in her lap it’s practically smiling. Children can be thoughtlessly cruel, so I assume that Julie was a nice kid to earn this kind of absolute trust from a cat.
This beautifully framed, happy chonk was painted by a Chinese artist in the 18th century.
I’m sure this is how my cat would prefer me to feed him every day. I love the addition of the jealous little dog beneath the fluffy feline overlord.
When I look at my cat I see a cute, cuddly, adorable creature. When birds and small mammals look at cats, they probably see something like this nightmarish vision from Picasso’s 1939 painting, likely inspired by the violence of the Spanish Civil War.
It seems that Picasso wasn’t a big fan of the pampered domestic fluff balls:
I hate pure-bred cats that purr on the pillow in the living room. I like feral cats that hunt birds, scamper around the streets like crazy, drag everything they get. They look at you with wild eyes ready to scratch your face.
Louis Wain (1860 – 1939) was an English artist famous for the thousands of sketches and paintings of cats displaying human behaviour. They enchanted the Victorians who were more likely to see cats as a mildly irritating tool of pest control. Some of his art is too saccharine and cutesy for my liking, but I love this painting in which a feline bachelor party is clearly approaching an advanced stage of debauchery. I bet there’s catnip in those cigars!
It seems that designers and illustrators just can’t resist Behemoth, the enormous demonic black cat who accompanies Satan on his visit to 1930s Moscow – and who can blame them? He is certainly my favourite fictional feline and makes for a great cover image. Here are some of the book covers I found.
Life got in the way for a while, but I finally found the motivation and momentum to complete this project! The finer details, like the trimming on Woody’s cowboy hat, really brought it to life. Now I’ll have to see if my artwork meets the approval of the harshest critic, my three-year-old niece.
To infinity and beyond! Buzz is now finished, even if he looks a tad creepy at the moment with his blank eyes. After I finish the finer details that are too fiddly to do with fabrics, next is the assembly time, where I put the top and bottom halves of the artwork together on the background, and pray that they fit.
