Yesterday my friend Audrey gave me a crocheting lesson. My mom once taught me to make a basic chain, but I never absorbed the lecture on turning around—so I was doomed to spend eternity weaving one continuous strand of yarn. Thanks to Audrey, now I can turn around and do a double stitch for double the fun! (I still refuse to count my stitches. Counting will never be a part of any hobby I take up.) Like most valuable skills, learning this one came with its share of cursing, yelling and bleeding. That’s just what happens when you try to keep two cats away from miles of colorful moving string.
After dinner Audrey said to me, “You are a crazy cat lady. You have two cats. That’s more than one cat. That makes you a cat lady.” Well, fine. I can’t argue with that logic. But it’s either talking to the cats or talking to myself, and I think the second is slightly more disturbing. Anyway, lots of writers and painters have a thing for cats. Hemingway, Gertrude Abercrombie, Pierre Bonnard (inspiration for my only piece of artwork featuring a cat), my poet friend Cole, Professor John Dilg…the list goes on.
Terrible images of disgustingly sweet kittens wearing big pink ribbons are easy to find--I’m thinking Umbridge’s office in Hogwarts. However, there were some legit artists who specialized in cats. Ever seen the yellow poster with the spiky black cat and the text, “Tournee du Chat Noir”? It’s by Theophile Steinlen, a prolific painter, sculptor and printmaker.
Louis Wain, though he was guilty of a few of his own excessively adorable cat paintings, created some deviously personified kitties. Diagnosed with schizophrenia (which, let’s just be clear, had no connection to his fondness for felines), Wain painted intriguing cat portraits to illustrate the way the illness made him feel.
Terrible images of disgustingly sweet kittens wearing big pink ribbons are easy to find--I’m thinking Umbridge’s office in Hogwarts. However, there were some legit artists who specialized in cats. Ever seen the yellow poster with the spiky black cat and the text, “Tournee du Chat Noir”? It’s by Theophile Steinlen, a prolific painter, sculptor and printmaker.
Louis Wain, though he was guilty of a few of his own excessively adorable cat paintings, created some deviously personified kitties. Diagnosed with schizophrenia (which, let’s just be clear, had no connection to his fondness for felines), Wain painted intriguing cat portraits to illustrate the way the illness made him feel.
Now, not only can you make art about cats, you can use live cats as art. Stacking stuff on sleeping cats is a challenging new form of sculpture. Photographers and witty captioneers are also benefiting from the cat genre.
Same goes for cat video voiceover-ists.
So yes, I have two cats. That's more than one cat, and that's fine with me.
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