More Preliminary Sketches - Cats

Here is another original sketch from an earlier journal (late '06 or early '07) of a man walking and being swarmed by cats. It is the first, in regard to the idea of a man with cats, and probably inspired the ones of the sitting man in the Aug 13 and 14 postings below.

Originally there were no cats. The drawing evolved from a very simple ink sketch based on my memory of wearing a suit in Japan in the Summertime. I was teaching English and it was mandatory to wear a business suit to orientations early in the contract, August and September, when it was still ungodly hot and humid. I was smoking then and have a vivid memory of myself trying to find my way to a meeting from the train station, getting lost, chain-smoking, and utterly baking along the way. The cats were added arbitrarily, although not that arbitrarily since cats pop up in my sketches here and there in my journals. There is one drawing I did of the same guy walking through a bunch of tulips. I thought cats would be funnier, as if they are the guy's fans, or entourage or something.



This is a much more recent sketch from last month. Now the cats are on their own; no man to harass. There is no concrete prior back-story driving this one. I started with abstract shapes as I often do in my journals and just let the imagery take shape freely with pencil and gouache. The totem cat on the left is an example of the kind of stylistic cat that pops up every once in a while in my books and the orange burst with the blue shapes exploding outward is simply form in search of meaning. The totem cat led to the addition of the cats on the right, and wanting to situate them in some kind of landscape I habitually chose a wide, desolate space with volcanoes in the background. This kind of landscape has worked its way into some of my more recent pictures, such as the two giraffes and the dive-bombing pigeon. Cats being the playful creatures they are, I thought the one should be batting around a fireball that erupted from the volcano.

Both of these sketches will be developed into more developed drawings like the other cat and sitting man drawings below.