A Delightful Little Diva
Oh, this illustration makes me chuckle – it’s delightful and funny. I once new a white cat just like this one, called Diva, and that naughty child is certainly being a bit of a diva!
This is the picture on the August page of my calendar, and it is a pleasant one to look at. The linework is masterful, as well as the trick of filling the negative spaces with a lovely palette of colour and pattern, and allowing the white of the page to fill the positive. It’s a very effective technique. Unfortunately, the calendar does not include illustration credits, but this looks 1920s or 30s to me.
Happy August, dear readers!
Come Home, Cat!
July’s calendar page is a poignant painting of a back door open letting all the welcoming yellow light out into the night, calling a little black cat home.
It immediately made me remember a children’s story book a friend gave me many years ago, called Cat, You Better Come Home, by Garrison Keillor, illustrated beautifully by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (Viking, 1995). It’s about a very self-confident cat who goes adventuring about the world. (You can have it read to you by Grandma Annii on YouTube.)
It turned out to be an omen, because my little kitty disappeared the day after my friend gave me the book! Fortunately my story had a happy ending – after a huge letterbox drop and plastering the neighbourhood with posters, my little Hero returned after a few days. Either she had been locked in someone’s garage, or someone had tried to keep her. What a joy her homecoming was!
Six Cats
January’s catLast December I started shopping for this year’s calendar early – I didn’t want a repeat of the year before when I really struggled on New Year’s Eve to find something that I liked. I don’t recall where I found this ‘Cats in Posters’ calendar by Catch Publishing, but as always my criteria was nice pictures and nice paper.
Unfortunately there is no information about the source material, but clearly the paintings range over a few decades and nations. I have been enjoying the first six months of pictures, but I think my favourite so far has to be June’s amusing Dutch black cat holding a spool of Zwicky thread like a harmonica.
February’s cat
March’s cat
April’s cat
May’s cat
June’s cat
Blog Backlog
After taking a long hiatus from this Sketchbook blog, I have been looking through my backlog and found the last two calendar pages from my 2017 Frankie calendar. Unfortunately I recycled the hard copy and kept no record of who these artists were! As I can’t find them online either, you will just have to enjoy them in anonymity.
November’s pussycat was a serendipitous and penultimate segue to my 2018 calendar of vintage cats. while December’s illustration was an apt forecasting of the coming Australian summer – if I recall correctly it didn’t settle in until January!
A Period of Quiet Reflection
October’s calendar page is a little startling at first glance: a young woman, seemingly with prickly cactus growing out of her. If I had written this story on the first of the month, I might have said it is an apt depiction of what some people go through with the onset of spring: hay fever.
Then yesterday, I might have said it was an accurate expression of many people’s feelings on hearing of yet another horrifying and heartbreaking shooting in America.
Today I have looked up the artist, Choi Mi-Kyung, who paints under the pseudonym Ensee, and I can find out little about this Korean graphic designer and illustrator who hides her face on her own website. She works digitally, and all her images display a similar, delicate aesthetic and subdued subject matter: ethereal girls (and occasionally boys) partially hidden behind foliage, birds, domestic scenes.
The pictures, especially viewed en masse, make one pause, and open a window into quiet reflection and tranquillity – a welcoming sense of stillness in today’s chaotic and sometimes disturbing world. It may even soothe the soul.