Taking it easy

Thematically, it’s all about the cat, obvs! Recollections can only get you so far. This picture This picture started when I was thinking about another cat, Alfie, pressing up against me wearing a Kikoi in another garden next to me in my Kikoi.

I wanted to show a cat relaxing while retaining his dignity. In that place, there was a red brick garden wall behind a weathered grey garden bench and my Kikoi was a bright Chrome Yellow… Alfie was a lovely seal brown Burmese and featured in some of my paintings, as has Cheeko -I think this might be appearance number three.

Cheeko looking smug is what I wanted to reconstruct. His expression here is one I often see when he comes to keep me company when I am in the studio. If I reach out to tickle him, this is the look I get. That’s part one.

Part two is the way he takes possession of some handy human to lie on. This is a pose my wife and he often adopt in the evening, stretching out together on a sofa. I decided to put them in the garden because there would be more colour around. The trees are in full leaf so it must be about May and he has decided to join us.

That’s when things started to get complicated. She would have to be doing something to make him look so content, so I have put one hand deep in his fur and the other cradling him. To limit the chocolatey colour in the middle of the picture I made his tail disappears behind one arm. If it were too warm, he would be looking for shade. Under the table onto which she has stretched her legs is a popular spot.

He really likes to have all three of us in the garden together. So, imagine, if you will, that we have gone out to have a coffee after lunch. Having been fed, he is inclined to doze calmly for a couple of hours. Enough time for me to absorb their arrangement and think about how I could turn it into a painting. Which is what happened.

The image was so powerful that I did not have to sketch and explore but committed directly to the canvas. With Cheeko centred the rest would arrange itself automatically.

I have reverted to restricting myself to white lines of unpainted canvas to define shapes. A clear blue sky meant she would be wearing a blue dress of the same colour. I resolved the railings behind her head into a black wedge that contrasts strongly with her hair which I made similar to the cat’s coat. Usually, I do not use black but a mixture of VDB and Prussian Blue but here I used a plain Mummy black which I have had for year, because of its intensity.  Rather than have more tawny shades I repeated the black under her legs because it just looked right.

I knew there would be greens and to complete my trio of colours I decided to make the bits of bare arms, legs and face a pinkish orange, The shadow areas pick up (literally) some of the blue from the dress and tonally come close to the cat’s coat. Her face is reduced into two zones, shaded and lit, with a thin white line running up the right-hand side to emphasise a check bone. Both figures are squinting because of the brightness of the light. His eyes are reduced to black slits. Hers pick up greens from the foliage areas slightly differentiated to reflect that one of them would have been in shadow and the other in full light.

I knew I was going to make the bench cushions Naples Yellow, picking up the bright parts of her hair and the shadows repeat the colours from the cat so that they blend together.

The trees and the distant landscape I radically simplified, so that there are sweeps of colour which transform within their zones but have the same scale as the other pictorial elements. The sky is the same blues as the dress. The fields are rendered as a single bluey green shield shape, close in colour to the sky but separated from it by a slight intensification of the green. On a warm day the haze can soften the colour of the distant trees on the skyline and this satisfied me as a way of reflecting that.