A cat may look at a king

This is a synthetic picture. It is based on what I could see, were I to look out my studio window, but via the first single line sketch I made of this about 8 years ago. I have painted St. Catherine’s Chapel twice before in the last 10 years or so, both imagined in daylight conditions. This is the moonlight version. There is another moonlit painting, “Moon over water” of two swans taking off from the moat by the Menin Gate in Ieper. This is my first “English moonlit view.” Our cat likes to hunt late at night but I have never seen him sitting in this window before doing so. When I see him here it is when I am in the studio, during the day. Exchoes of Kipling’s “The Cat that walks alone” made me put him here. That, and the way I could play off yellow and blue.

I have augmented reality by making the chapel ruins more dominant than they actually are and showing the tracks across the hillside on which it stands which I know are there but which would not actually show from this view point and I have suppressed a pair of conifers that stand up like a gun sight on the first ridge behind the chapel.

Although our cat likes to sit on the edge of my desk to look out – almost as good as being on the roof but without the risk of being mobbed by the crows he is at war with – he did not conveniently pose for me, because this sighting never really happened. The third thread in the picture is the arabesque which Matisse uses in his odalisque paintings and you can see in Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus, here marking the track the moon follows across the sky from left (east, as we face south) to right. I have watched the moon track across the gap between the tress on either side of the painting and it doesn’t wobble but I wanted that arabesque so here the moon does what I want it to.

 I kept a tight rein on the colours using only two greens and two yellows. The predominant colour isa blend of Prussian Blue and Chrome Green, with varying amounts of white added. This approximates to the summer colour. The picture is imagined with the abundant summer foliage so that the stands of trees down the hill and on the right are not skeletal. I used Sap Green for the yew overhanging the fence and the conifer standing on an upper part of our garden on the left. I scratched in some indicative branches and then waited until the paint was nearly dry to add additional coats of the same paint to the shadow areas and the finally highlighted the tops of branches and their tips using a mixture of the green with some Naples Yellow Light, The moon is painted in a fifty-fifty mix of white and the same Naples Yellow.

The base colour for the cat is Yellow Ochre as that seemed to be the right key to compliment the blues. It is more or less his colour. The greyish guard hairs in his coat are rendered in a mix of the Naples Yellow Light, Van Dyke Brown and white. The VDB repeats in the texture of the hedges and in his ears.