In a cat’s world

In true artistic temperament, cats are stubborn about their preferences: you certainly cannot tell a cat where to sit.

Abrakadabra by Anamika

Several Chennai artists have an affinity for cats and I follow in their footsteps to take up a favourite topic and unguarded obsession. Their independence, reserve, affection and loyalty, definitely attract us. In true artistic temperament, cats are stubborn about their preferences: you certainly cannot tell a cat where to sit.

For senior artist R.B. Bhaskaran, drawing cats began as “motivational acts” to teach students at the College of Art. A trio occupy his canvas at Artworld’s ongoing show, almost appearing sculpted. After a 1983 show at the British Council entirely on cats, he was nicknamed Cat Bhaskaran. Bhaskaran’s many cats are eternal studies within the cat’s contours: silhouettes fashioned in linocuts and bejewelled bodies attentive to a decorative trend. His are signature cats, strong yet whimsical with an uncanny line that moves from his own centre of reckoning to pursue the untended. We really do not know where a cat goes, so the only recourse is to imagine and Bhaskaran’s line solicits enigma.

Cat is also the title of his sculptures in copper, brass and enamel. With whirls of welded spikes and sheet, he draws a feverish energy out of metal with as much immediacy as with pen or pencil on paper. These belong to a 1994 commissioned collection and were part of a rare showing at Vinnyasa this year. Most vivid is Bhaskaran’s

Woman with Cat and Fish, a white on black etching, sparkling like Orion on a clear night sky. It was made during a senior printmaker’s camp hosted at the Government College of Art, Chandigarh with Lalit Kala Akademi. Just four prints exist — Bhaskaran’s, the printer’s, the third at Chandigarh College and the last at Lalit Kala’s National Collection. It took a day to make the plate and the composition came together spontaneously on the theme of survival — the fish, the cat and the woman.

With her penchant for surrealistic quirks, Asma Menon’s

The Cat Man recalls her teacher Bhaskaran. In his prolific wake, Asma was hesitant at first to take up the cat as a subject. Fate took over when she was commissioned to make a series of serigraphs to raise funds for an NGO for the welfare of cats. Asma’s hyperbolic portraiture often looks beyond the frame. So does her canvas in Catamaran Nights . It stretches five feet wide to accommodate the span of two cats on a catamaran watching the full moon suspended in a midnight blue sky. Luminous yellow lotuses pop up in-between. In this cat paradise, the kitties can choose between moon-gazing and fish-catching.

These instinctive links between fish, cat and humans continue with V. Anamika tracing evolution in a connected universe. Her cat portraiture is a magical brew of pinks and red, reminding us of (good) witches with their cats stirring a bubbling pot from which a misty smoke emanates. We see visions of the future or hidden past, otherwise inconceivable. Anamika uses silverpoint, a Renaissance technique, dragging across a silver rod prepared with gesso or primer. A drawn line cannot be erased and fine draughtsmanship is essential. Silverpoint shares a commonality with black and white photography in the use of silver, which lasts long.

Like in a photogram, Anamika renders the varying transparency of things from translucent to opaque, yielding skeletal outlines to solid silhouettes. The vaporous canvas reveals a distinctive cat profile and the rest mingles into our senses, threatening to disappear with a wave of the wand if we do not spot it fast enough: a tiny seahorse, an upturned dolphin, the outline of a woman and unmistakably the word

Abrakadabra . Constellations of stars appear in an uncharted sky.

A large red dahlia blooms in full splendour over the cat, making us focus on the object of admiration.

Cats are portrayed as mostly watching and waiting; an aspect attended to by every ailurophile devoted to capturing the essence of a cat. You rarely find a painting in which a cat is not in a meditative pose.

A nocturnal creature caught up in the velvet hours of night where time slips, such elusiveness endears its pursuers to seek the cat infinitely.

(Chennai Canvas links art to design and culture through an inside look at the city).