Nia Gould - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cat

For Olive, Kerry & Nova

Copyright 2020 by Nia Gould.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN: 978-1-4521-7851-6 (epub, mobi)

ISBN: 978-1-4521-7838-7 (hardcover)

Design by Kayla Ferriera.

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19031975

Barbara Catworth was a nature-loving cat whose influential sculptural work was largely inspired by the organic shapes she saw in her surrounding landscape.

Her closest friend and rival was fellow student Henry Meowre. As students they both became well-known for the direct carving sculptural method, where the artist consciously respects the nature of the material. Their shared interest in organic form and materials led to both mutual admiration and occasional hissing over the similarities in their work.

Early in her career Catworth spent some time traveling around Europe with her husband, Ben Nicatson. She visited the studios of some of Europes most influential artists and made many friends in her nine lives including Pablo Picatso, Piet Meowdrian, and Catstantin Brancusi. During this time, she sharpened her claws and her skills on different materials such as wood, stone, plaster, bronze, and marble. Circles and spheres dominated her work during this phase (many cats so love a ball); later she started creating ovals with two centers, and thus a more complicated form. This visit proved to be extremely important in her career; she had gained a set of highly influential feline artist friends and had also become a key figure in the abstract art movement as a result.

Her sculptures have a calming quality and look as though they might have been created by natural occurrences. Incorporating hollow forms and often considering negative space, her pieces can resemble shells and caves. Catworth also explored piercing holes in her carvings. The holes allowed the viewer a kind of cats-eye peek at a framed space and at the same time abstracted the portion of landscape in view. Catworth moved to St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1939, and here she created Pelagos (Sea in Greek). The influence of her surroundings there can be seen in the sculptures spiral shape. These pierced pieces were seen as an important contribution to the rise of abstract sculptural art, and for her innovations she won many prizes.

In a field dominated by male cats, Catworth rose to international fame for her work. Today, Catworth is considered one of the greatest feline sculptors of the twentieth century.

Pelagos, 1946
BARBARA HEPWORTH

1945

Barbara Clawger, originally from New Jersey, is a cat with a pawsion for visual language. She studied as a graphic designer and went on to work for some very famous magazines. This world of powerful fashion and image status became an inspiration for her own artwork.

After leaving that world behind to purrsue her own career, she soon became known for laying aggressively direct slogans on red backgrounds over black-and-white photographs that she found in the very magazines she once designed. Her work gives us paws and pushes cats everywhere to reconsider our assumptions about gender, race, consumerism, power, and corporate greed.

A sharp-eyed cat with an unflinching cat-titude, Clawger often displays her social-commentary works in highly public spaces, and she sells her work on commercial products to reach cats of all stripes. She is one of the most famous postmodern feminist cat artists working today.

Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989
BARBARA KRUGER

Roy Toy, 1986
BARBARA KRUGER

1931

Bridget Rawrley was born in London but spent most of her time as a kitten roaming around the coast of Cornwall. This landscape inspired her interest in light, color, and form, and her earlier works employed Post-Impressionist and Pointillist techniques.

However, with her special talent for purrceiving shape and color, she headed back to London with only two colors in her pawlette: black and white. With these tools, she painted simple geometric shapes and explored how their interactions affected optical purrception.

These paintings fascinated her cat-temporaries and became influential in the Op Art movement, which captured the imagination of cats internationally during the 1960s. These works are known for their geometric repetitions and illusions of the cat eye that make the canvas seem to move.

Rawrleys artworks take months to complete, as they are large-scale and every single one is painted by paw. In fact, the canvases are so large, she often needs more paws and enlists teams of helpers to create them.

While she had pawsionately embraced the effects of working in black and white, Rawrley later introduced color but limited herself to using just three at a time. Her style changed again when she visited Egypt, where Rawrley was so inspired by the colors of the landscapes that she felt she had found the purrfect palette. She introduced new colors more freely and in a less ordered way, and the use of warm hues and more spontaneous sequencing reflected an important shift in her work.

Rawrley creates mesmeowerizing and unique abstract paintings that explore the nature of what and how we see. She remains one of the most important and iconic British cat-temporary abstract cat artists.