Animal Portraits Revisited

I used my birthday gift to attend a 2.5-hr wood burning (pyrography) class in Bothell with my daughter. Here's the resulting portrait of our two dogs on a cutting board (a.k.a. chartcuterie). The trick to tracing both straight and curved lines is to move the tip of the tool slowly and steadily across the surface. You must get used to the wood grain interrupting the flow. Shading, as with drawing and painting, is another technique to master.

The class was hosted at Piper (boutique) in Bothell, WA with instructor Crystal Bailar. It was a relaxing class and they served wine and snacks. It afforded me the opportunity to try new techniques. We used locally sourced maple which had some beautiful grain. I almost wish that I had done a mountain landscape since the clouds would have come ready made!

My Daughter's Landscape

I probably should have traded boards with my daughter as her wood had no visible grain pattern.

Oscar, Violet, Tanner, and Chachi

My brother and I share a common interest in painting animals, landscapes, and sports figures in different media. We encourage each other by reviewing and commenting on our work and challenging ourselves to try other media and techniques. Some day I will try Paint 3D like my brother’s ~mixed-media electronic drawings. Recently, my brother completed 3 more cat portraits, adding Oscar, Violet, and Tanner to the one of Chachi from my previous post. He then used Zazzle to create a throw pillow to match his new sofa.

If you struggle with drawing, try tracing a photograph using a printout sized to your paper (stretched canvas, or even a cutting board), using carbon paper and a stylus or even a graphite pencil. The amount of detail is up to you. This method will help with proportions and for portraits get the facial features right.

It’s still fun to practice drawing, and getting past such hurdles will enable you to focus on learning to paint with a brush, a stick of chalk pastel, or a wood burning tool. There are many techniques to learn, all which require practice to master. Always try out new tools or tips on a scrap piece of wood first.

Averil by Cheryl Schmitz

As you progress your own style will emerge. The thing I’ve been working on lately is editing. I also want to be more creative about my color schemes and backgrounds. Don’t be afraid to use your imagination and expression to interpret what you see. Get inspired by studying the artwork of others. You may copy a landscape, for example, from a photograph you took with your camera or assemble your own composition from individual trees or mountain shapes.

Aya by Cheryl Schmitz

My colleague from Paws with Cause, resident artist Cheryl Schmitz, gets creative with her color schemes, making beautifully artistic renditions of these shelter animals. Also notice the editing and how well-chosen her background colors enhance the portrait.

Disney's Tramp Pumpkin

Golden Retriever Pumpkin

Collecting various examples will spark your imagination and enable you to visualize and arrange your own compositions. I challenged myself this Halloween by copying two dog portraits and actively demonstrated my pumpkin carving skills at the Everett Farmers' Market. I also found that a linoleum cutter worked really well for scraping,

When pumpkin carving, use a washable marker to sketch the line to guide your cuts. This is certainly an opportunity to edit down to the essential details. I've been experimenting with my range of values through scraping off the skin and exposing various depths. This is also where you can develop your understanding of positive and negative space. This  year I was afforded the opportunity to teach an online pumpkin carving class. I reimagined the Husky mascot from a previous year and also used scraping for the cheeks and jeweled beads for the eyes.

I want to finish with another rendition of a Bryce and Jeju portrait. While in Palm Springs last year the pair was watching me from inside a bedroom window and we captured them in a photo I used to paint a watercolor portrait. The proportions look a little off, but realize that Bryce is on the bed and Jeju is standing on the floor at the wall in the middle ground. The inside, bottom half of the picture is less-focused, in shadow, and the dogs' silhouettes appear highlighted by the sunlight streaming in the window. I like the contrast to the vivid outside landscape. I probably should have edited out the wires around the telephone pole, but then it would have read as a tree. Maybe I could have removed it altogether! See what I mean about editing?!

Cats in the World of Art & Painting

The Large Cat (1657), Cornelis Visscher

Growing up and when my daughter was young we had several cats, mainly tabbies. I found this engraving by Dutch artist Cornelis Visscher (1629-58) which you can see at the Art Institute of Chicago. The website calls this "one of the softest, most tactile renditions of a cat ever printed". I agree!

Chachi the Cat (2021), J. Patterson

This post is inspired by a recent colored pencil drawing of a barn cat completed by my brother, who also paints other subjects such as dogs and horses. In May of last year, for my 100th post, I published Anthropomorphic Art -- Animals as Humans, which was inspired by a kitschy portrait of a squirrel wearing glasses that my brother shared from a visit to his optometrist's office. It included the Abraham Teniers painting of cats being pampered by monkeys (check it out!).

Bo from Purrfect Pals

My own cat creation happened at a Saturday Sit-Stay-'n'-Play painting event at the Everett Mall when I first started volunteering with PawsWithCause.

Lina from Purrfect Pals

Another senior participant painted this awesome calico cat portrait.

I enjoy seeing how the public gets inspired by these shelter animals. Being an art docent is a rewarding endeavor that helps people of all ages find their inner artist.

White Angora Cat (1761), Bachelier

Another favorite of mine is the white angora cat beautifully (oil) painted by French artist, Jean-Jaques Bachelier. Here we see a cat chasing a butterfly. The cat's fur is well-executed. Though I wouldn't want to have to brush that coat!

Two Cats Blue and Yellow
(1912), Franz Marc

Cats on a Red Cloth (1909),
Franz Marc

20th century German Expressionist Franz Marc captured some cats sleeping or grooming themselves. The first painting is more realistic than his second more expressive Cubist work. Can you find the mouse?

18th century English artist Thomas Gainsborough also studied feline positions of the Great Cat. According to the referenced link, his black-and-white chalk drawing is similar to that of another famous artist from the 15th century.

Apparently, I missed Paul Gauguin's Flowers and Cats (1899) while visiting the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen, Denmark on our cruise to the Baltics in June 2019.

Another recent post, entitled Making Connections with Artists & Animals features the cats of French Fauvist Henri Matisse.

Many of the world's most famous artists kept cats as pets. Here's a list:

Henri Matisse (Minouche, Coussi, and Le Puce); Pierre Bonnard (Cat);

Salvador Dali (Babou); Gustav Klimt (Katze); Georgia O’Keeffe (Siamese); 

Pablo Picasso (Minou); Louis Wain (Peter); Andy Warhol (Sam); and

        Wassily Kandinsky (Vaske)

We lost American artist Laurel Burch in 2007. She was famous for her bold cat designs such as those featured in one of her books, Fantastic Felines (1997). I believe we've done a jigsaw puzzle like this.

My Art Journey

JFK (1963),
Elaine de Kooning

I've loved visual art ever since I could hold a crayon. I remember being encouraged early on by my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Schroeder, when coloring in an orange pumpkin in October 1963. It was the year President JFK was assassinated and I vividly remember my teacher crying after the announcement came over the PA. The event happened on my parents' wedding anniversary. It was also the year my Mom became a three-day winner on the gameshow Concentration. We watched her on TV in my older brother's third-grade classroom while making paper-plate Christmas wreathes. All of these things left an indelible impression.

Here's an article, Why Elaine de Kooning’s Portrait of JFK Broke All the Rules from the Smithsonian about the making of a presidential portrait.

Choir Boys Will Be Boys (1938),
Frances Tipton Hunter

My Dad was especially creative. I've blogged about his talent for painting and creating award-winning Christmas displays. One year, he cut out six life-size choir boys and painted them in our likenesses, adding a few other ethnicities to round out the ensemble. I remember how he adapted Santa's sleigh out of a paint tray and sat a stuffed Santa inside, then mounted Styrofoam reindeer on the front of our house. Since our house was white he used a spotlight with a rotating colored disc to change the background of his display. He would spell out messages such as, "Peace on Earth", using wire wrapped in silver garland. Another time, he constructed a huge cross that again used a spotlight for his 'Born in the Shadow of the Cross' display.

This painting was published in the Saturday Evening Post, but not by Norman Rockwell. Notice the shiner and crossed bandage.

Clown (after Emmitt Kelly) (1968)

I blogged about how my brother and I decorated the wall of our Dentist's office with a 3D circus scene one year. My Mom decided that we needed to be enrolled in an oil painting class, which resulted in my one-man show in a display case outside the Principal's office in sixth-grade.

I became an 'Art Major' in high school studying under Mr. George Pappas. While I vaguely remember some of the artwork and paintings I made in his classroom, two projects stick out in my mind. One was painting numbers on wooden blocks for our school tennis court clocks for scheduling play times. The other was creating paper mâché Cardinal heads for our two school mascots. In the yearbook, I was listed as Most Artistic male.

Cowboy (1982), Ken Patterson

In college, I spent my first year studying Architecture. As the market was predicted to be flooded with architects by the time I would graduate, I switched to Engineering. My tech-elective was minicomputers. This ultimately led me to a career in Software Engineering. Here's one of my first post-college watercolors.

Since studying Art History in college, I've been steadily accruing knowledge about the visual arts. I've amassed quite a library of artbooks and have visited art museums around the world. While cruising the Baltics, we docked at St. Petersburg where we had the opportunity to tour the Hermitage Museum. Both the Hermitage (2019) and the Louvre (2011) would require days to see everything on display there.

Mrs. Henderson's Memory Quilt (1998-9)

My passion for art has led me to sharing what I know and learn in a classroom setting. For many years I was an art docent in my daughter's elementary school. Her 6th-grade class made logos of their intended careers using acrylic paint on muslin squares, which my sister-in-law sewed into a memory quilt for the teacher. My daughter wanted to be a Disney Imagineer (top-middle).

I also became an instructor at Green River Community College's Interurban Center for the Arts, teaching other parents to do the Picture Person Program. I've volunteered at the Seattle Art Museum and was a fundraiser for ArtsFund.

Ballet Scene (2019), Ken Patterson

Since my retirement, I have continued to volunteer teach in elementary schools, senior centers and adult assisted living centers, adult dementia daycare, and at Franke Tobey Jones' Senior University. For my pastels class, I copied A Ballet Seen From the Opera Box (1885) by Edgar Degas as an example. My copy was painted on purple pastel paper.

Miró Balance (2021), Patterson

In 2021, I became an online art instructor with Heart Art Healing. I resurrected my lesson on balanced compositions, which had been inspired by Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró. This one could have also been used for my class that used repetition of the spiral shape, symbolizing gratitude.

Gunther (2021), KAP

Myra (2021), KAP

I completed my first commissioned portraits on behalf of Paws with Cause. At PwC we raise money and awareness to care for and advertise the adoption of shelter animals as fur-ever pets. Gunther was a challenge because he was an all-white dog. The client requested the color turquoise in the background. I think the color schemes will enable the portraits to be hung side-by-side.