Today’s watercolor experiment:

I remember this photo I took in 1991. The canvas on which this graffiti cat was created was a scrappy, rotted wooden panel next to some metal steps. That must have been a day when I only had my camera loaded with black and white film. On my dedicated photography walks, I took two cameras, one with color and one with black and white film.

The scrappiness of the substrate on which the scrappy cat is displayed supplies texture, a texture important to the composition. Some oil painters apply paint thickly (called impasto) to create texture.

My painting below is not a copy of the graffiti cat photo. I wanted to make my own graffiti.

Whereas the paper I used for today’s study is smaller than the graffiti cat in the photo, I got a taste of what it means to paint agitated, lines of a scared feral cat. I can understand the energy that went into painting a larger version of the angry kitty. It must have been liberating for the artist.