Featured Artwork: Nikka's Jupiter Ball

So here it is, finally finished! And I love it—I'm obsessed with it today, carrying it around the house with me so I can keep looking at it. It's exciting to see an idea, an image you've visualized for decades, suddenly be there right before your eyes. All of Nikka's markings and her big round yellow-green eyes, all the rich colors, the light, the familiar things, just what I've been seeing all these years. And mostly, the moment and the memory she and I shared of one of her favorite activities. She made direct eye contact with me—“do you see this?!”—yes, I could see her excitement, and then she put on an athletic feat of chasing it all around the room.

I was a little bit excited about how this painting turned out wasn’t I? I had shared daily updates from the day I started working on it, something I don’t typically get the chance to do.

It’s titled “Nikka’s Jupiter Ball” because what inspired it is Nikka’s excited expression, and her ball right there, a moment I witnessed when I walked into my bedroom one late afternoon and saw her in the sun under the rocker, then saw the ball and understood. It was her favorite toy and she always got the big round eyes when she saw it, then she’d bat it all over the room. I remembered that moment out of many, but did not get a photo of her in action.

I have many photos of Nikka on film and a few from my first digital camera, some of my favorites above, but I lost her in 2003. I knew from the beginning that I would want to paint this scene, and I used both digital and film to capture this corner of my bedroom in the right light. Because it's season-specific, and I had a big maple tree outside the window, I had only a few weeks in winter when the light was just right—and my bedroom wasn't suddenly filled with extra furniture from my mother's house, which I sold in 2004. I mocked up the scene but it still needed some work. Here are a few of the digitals.

I chose the best background angle and colors and pillow position and made a composite with bits and pieces of all the photos to work from. Every time I'd take it out to consider working on it, I'd tweak it again. And that didn't even make it ready—I mentioned I'd taken this out in January to start on it and started tweaking it again...until last week when I decided I just had to start painting to make the final decisions. On the left is the one I created years ago, on the right is the final one I worked from for this painting. I painted Nikka's round eyes from memory.

Here is just Nikka, all finished.

Some of my favorite detail areas. Click on each image to enlarge.

I had several ideas about the size and shape and content for this painting, and originally wanted it to show more of the scene, especially the cat pillows on the rocker. I worked it down to what is shown above, but there was a little more painting all around that area that I might use in prints or when I apply the image to handmade merchandise. Here is the uncropped version.

I painted this in various brands of soft pastels, mostly the softest, Sennelier, but also including others as colors were needed from Alphacolor to Rembrandt and lots of other brands as I’ve picked up small sets and individual pastels as well as “inherited” some from friends. I go for color, but the relative soft or hard composition is just as important whether I’m making clear lines and edges or I want to blend a little or a lot. I used Clairfontaine Pastelmat pastel paper in “wine” color, a very fine-surfaced sanded pastel paper that grabs and holds the pastel, which means you can layer pastels and draw one color atop another until the surface is full of pastel in an area, but you can still smudge and blend. I love to work on that surface.

You may recognize Nikka from posts on The Creative Cat, and a few stories. She's the first dilute kitty who made me love all dilute torties and calicos.

My first litter

She was born in the first litter I rescued and fostered in 1988, My First Litter, and was later adopted by my brother and girlfriend. I was on a roll with naming cats with East European names from my Polish and Ukrainian heritage and a few other mixes. I named a big solid gray male Boris, and Nikka was fairly big and though a dilute tortie looked fairly silvery gray at that age so I named her Natasha, pulling in a little Bullwinkle for fun. My brother, a jazz lover, renamed her Nikka after pianist Horace Silver's “Nica’s Dream,” though he spelled it differently. In fact, I almost named this painting "Nikka's Dream" for her name and that memory as well as her dream of spending exciting time with her favorite toy.

My brother's cat, then coming back home

Five years later as his life as an alcoholic was becoming too chaotic I brought her back home to my feline family in Coming Back Home. She had always had a strong personality but after a few years as an only cat really didn't care for other cats in her territory; they adopted a cat after about a year and she terrorized that poor tabby, even to the point he developed urinary issues and reacted with trauma to being handled. After she and my brother had split up all Tabby’s issues cleared up completely. Nikka tried the same tactics when she came here even after a very long introduction, so we worked with a system of time-outs in the studio for the decade she was here. Once pheromones came along I could see what they would have done for her.

A senior kitty visiting senior ladies

But Nikka never lost her love for people and was always friendly, outgoing and affectionate. I couldn't find an adopter so she stayed with me. In the early 2000s I had moved my mother to a personal care home where many of the ladies had had to give up their kitties to move there. I took Nikka to visit them several times. She was so happy when I took her into the living room where all the ladies were watching TV and she could wander around and choose a lap, and all the ladies wanted to pet her. Read A Senior Kitty to Visit Senior Ladies.

We don't see too much of her on The Creative Cat even though she was with our feline family for more than a decade, but she kind of fell into the "doughnut hole" between film and digital. I had lost her years before I started publishing The Creative Cat, and I pulled photos from film of all the cats who were still with me to share when I wrote about them. But now that I'm able to spend more time with my film photo archives I'm finding more photos of her and share her as often as I can.

While my websites are still offline, please ask if you are interested in prints or merchandise.

I hope you enjoy my featured artwork posts where I review one of my (usually favorite) paintings including a discussion of inspiration and place if appropriate, medium, style, preparations and creation, for those who are curious and for those who are learning. I alternate feline art and nature/wildlife/florals each week.