Cat 54

Cat 54, Shitz on the porch railing.
Acrylic on canvas. 14" x 11".
(sold)

After working with all the strait-from-the-tube bright colors, I needed to work on something more subdued.

This is Shitz, (aka "Shitty Kitty"), a cat I lived with years ago. Her unfortunate name came about as a kitten, not always choosing to use the litter box to do her business. She eventually outgrew that problem, but the lousy name stuck. In her senior years she developed diabetes and had to endure daily insulin injections.
Back then it was less risky to let the cats spend time outside and she spent a lot of time on the front porch. Now I have too many predators around, driven in closer as their habitats are taken over by nearby developments.

In spite of her cranky stare, she had a quiet, amiable personality. A little shy.

I never did get around to buying a tube of black paint, so I started with a red ground, and applied alternate layers of blue, green and umber until it was built up to a dark mass. The difficulty was to get an accurate shot- the camera wants to lean the colors towards either red or blue and I couldn't get the shot to read correctly as a photo. The colors seem to separate in the photo, instead of the eye blending them. It might be a perception thing that can't be resolved.
This was as close as I could get to how it really looks. Its pretty close.