LETTERS FROM HOME: THE SECRET LIFE OF GARFIELD VAN GOGH

Oct. 10, 1996

Dear Carol,

It's the time of perfect days in Missouri, skies so blue you'd think they were painted, the trees just beginning to add yellows and reds to the canvas. Wonder how your cat Amelia would capture the picture.

The guy who cuts my hair, you see, told me about a book called "Why Cats Paint." He says, snip, snip, "Yeah, they put some paints in front of a cat and it'll dip its paws in and paint what it sees." Snip, snip. Landscapes if the cat's looking out a window, he says. And you can really tell what it was painting.

Though a skeptic by trade, I am as willing as the next person to believe that animals possess abilities humans are unaware of or don't properly respect. Cats that travel a thousand miles to return to their owners (you try it without being able to read), dogs that save lives. Hank and Lucy are perfect mirrors of our emotional states. If one of us is upset, they gather round to sympathize with saliva. If we're being boisterous, lamps are in danger.

Heck, apes can learn sign language. But cats that paint?

Sooooo, I asked, trying to anticipate a punch line, is it a certain breed of cats that paint or can any old cat do it?

All breeds can paint, he said, without a trace of guile but some finality.

Sitting there with hair flitting over my eyes, I acknowledged the mysterious and unknowable about cats, and slowly began to consider the possibility that cats can paint and had their own books to prove it. This was flabbergasting news. Why isn't the Johns Hopkins of veterinary colleges making announcements. Where are the cat art galleries? And if cats can paint, what else can they do?

I had to know.

You can't just go out and buy "Why Cats Paint." You have to order it. Which somehow gave some credence to the whole mysterious idea. After a week, somebody at the bookstore called to say my copy of "Why Cats Paint" had arrived. He didn't laugh.

There it was, subtitled "A theory of feline aesthetic," the cover a beautiful photograph of a paint-smeared cat seeming to make an Expressionistic statement across a wall. The jacket includes praise from the L.A. Art Times for a book that "provides clear interpretations of individual works while avoiding polemics and premature judgments."

"Why Cats Paint" traces cat painting from the days of early Egypt, citing the mummified remains of royal cats bearing scrolls with paw prints on them. Also provided are theories for marking behavior, and a conclusion that marking behavior can be aesthetically motivated in cats with no need to mark their territory.

The odd thing, the authors find, is that cats that are able to make admittedly crude representations of objects always paint them upside down. Thus the term "invertism" was coined to describe the phenomenon.

A lavishly illustrated section is devoted to 12 major cat artists: Tiger, the spontaneous reductionist whose "Eclectic Currents" is a fine example of acrylic and paste on scratched satin and whose "Hands up! Mr. Rooster" is DC's personal favorite; Misty, the formal expansionist whose refusal to confine her work to the borders of the canvas creates "negative space" when she rips the painting off the wall; and Ginger, the neo-synthesist "who sometimes relates so strongly to her paintings that she rubs against them before they are dry, so inadvertently destroying them."

There are examples of three-dimensional art as well: "Passing Through," a heavily scratched couch arm that has facial qualities; many examples of litter box art; and avant-garde installations of "stabilized life forms" (mice).

OK, cats can paint. But they can't paint very well.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.