Cat 56

Cat 56, Lizzy in the chair by the wood stove.
Acrylic on canvas. 14" x 11".
(sold)

It's been below freezing for the past week, and getting progressively colder each day. Approaching the single digits at night, we are running the wood stove pretty much non-stop now.
Lizzy has abandoned the heating pad in preference for the overstuffed chair near the wood stove. She only leaves it to eat or do her business.

Having done a similar painting of her in this chair I decided to reinvent her as a gray cat to make it more interesting for myself to work on.
I wanted to include the wood stove in the picture, and had to figure out how to paint fire. Its going to take more experimenting to figure out how to achieve that intense glow of the burning logs; dropping the adjacent color saturation and values helped, but didn't produce the glow I wanted to see.

This painting was about impossible to get an accurate shot of. I kept getting an intense reflection off the surface in the dark areas, and depending on how I angled the canvas, odd looking areas of blues or reds. Adjusting the white balance on the camera as well as different lighting produced various results, but none that really nailed it.

Cat 55

(Above- the painting reworked a few years later... )

Cat 55, Oscar in the corner
Acrylic on canvas. 14" x 11".

While visiting with my mother the other day, Oscar wandered into the room, parked himself in a corner, and made a big production of grooming while peering at us from a safe distance. He never looks directly at anyone- just stares at an invisible point slightly to the side or through you. Maybe he has a vision problem. More likely he is not comfortable making direct eye contact with these relative strangers invading his space.

I liked the twisting angle of his body against the straight lines of the walls and floor. Getting the odd angles of his torso to read correctly was a challenge, and I ended up having to reposition the size, angle and details of the head several times and make subsequent adjustments to the surrounding torso before it looked plausible to me.
In retrospect, I wish I had pulled back and allowed more room for the walls and floor to emphasize the empty, personal space around him. I'm still not sure that I like the saturated yellow wall, but when I cover it up the painting goes a bit flat for me.