THAT CAT AGAIN

That cat again.

We have noticed that one of my most popular blogs this year was the one that I wrote about a black cat. (That Damn Cat). His name was Trevor. He was a feature of many paintings and prints that both my wife and I painted and published. We still sell original paintings and signed and numbered edition prints about him.

CAT and GRAMOPHONE

Cats don’t usually listen to music on old gramophones. This picture of Trevor was inspired by a rather famous logo for a different company. Thanks to HMV.

The style of painting in my picture above is called ‘cloisonnism’ where areas of colour are edged with dark lines. This is an established expressionist style first described in about 1888 during the post-impressionist era. Gaugin and Bernard are usually cited as examples. So I feel quite good about using this language to make my cats and kitchen pictures.

Cat news.

As I mentioned previously Trevor is actually an ex-cat now having gone over the rainbow bridge to cat heaven a long time ago. Nowadays we have another black cat called Karly.

Karly was rescued by a family friend from a deprived and dangerous household and we agreed to look after her as a favour. She was small thin and dishevelled. (The cat, not the friend.)

Karly first went to a vet who spayed her, fixed her teeth, and fitted a chip. Then we introduced her to her new home. She hadn’t ever been outside in her life before having been living in a third floor flat. After a quite few days we opened our conservatory door to see what she made of the great outdoors. We watched as she looked outside. She slowly and cautiously took a small one-paw step over the threshold and suddenly noticed that there was no ceiling and quickly came back.

It took a few more days before she gathered courage to explore our garden. We watched as she walked on mown grass for the first time. We saw her smell the air and the flowers with interest. We were there when she first saw squirrels and birds. And eventually she met the neighbourhood bully cat.

Nowadays Karly is a big, strong, fit, and healthy black cat. She comes and goes through her dedicated, expensive, chip-accepting, cat-flap. We have seen her chase foxes away when they come into the garden. She has a small chunk of one ear missing that we think came about when she disagreed with bully cat about who was boss. Karly is! No doubt about that.