Cats at play

The uppermost cat in this picture is our chocolate Burmese and he is playing with his friend, a blue Burmilla. They are both neutered toms. They found each other when our boy started to explore the neighbourhood to establish his territory. He very quickly let it be known that other cats would be unwelcome on his ground and he would deal with them accordingly. Then one day we were surprised to see him followed by the blue. No hissing, no arched backs, no parallel presentations, no staring matches, but happy chasing over garden furniture and around bushes.

Before he arrived we had seen the blue very occasionally. WhatsApp helped us learn where he came from and we were offered little snatches of video recording them playing elsewhere, at the home of the blue about 200 metres away and other places in between. We learned that the blue is a 10 year old Burmilla, not a Burmese and that his people had been on the point of getting another cat to keep him company.

I could not get them to pose - they are cats - so this game is a piece of imaginative reconstruction based on having seen them playing on our terrace one afternoon. 

I wanted to emphasise their similar size and shape. I set up a diagonal from corner to corner of the canvas across which I set up a reflected symmetry which I could manipulate.  For example, their tails both curl, but differently. The difference in eye colour was a given. My sketch had them facing each other vertically but I kept thinking that the games involved a lot of rolling so I changed this to a horizontal arrangement. I also wanted to emphasise their colour casts, so the blue and yellow coats were strongly expressed.

The Burmilla' has marked stripes on his legs, tail and mask and his back legs seem to have a solid black underside, which, with the back paw of the Burmese became the central pivot of the two cats' swirl.

The bench started out with a tawny base colour, a paler version of the Burmese but I shifted that with the wood graining in blues and green, allowing ne to tie it to the colour of the plant in the flower pot in the right of the picture and the general greenish planting which fills out the canvas.

I really felt impelled to add the red break line on the “shadow side of the cats, to detach them from the overall use of white break lines, just to complicate things a bit. You can start something, then you have to let the language look after itself.

I happily admit to being cat fixated, having lived with them ever since the night a heavily pregnant black cat moved into my bedside table and proceeded to deliver her litter. My parents were out and I was overawed by what was happening. Black, with a white bib, she must have been a direct descendant of Pharaonic cats as this was happening within half a mile of the banks of the Nile. Abyssinian? Maybe? She started my lifelong love of oriental cats.