My solo show for 2019 is hosted by the Patchogue Arts Council and will be on display at the Patchogue Theater of the Arts on Main Street, in Patchogue, NY from June 15 to July 28, 2019.

The theme for this year’s season of the arts in Patchogue is “Artful Antics.” All of the pieces in this show were created in 2019 for this show.

Why Cats?

Cats have appeared in art since at least ancient Egypt.  I wanted to take my postcard sized cats to another level of creativity. Cats were worshiped in places like Egypt, persecuted and are popular in social media with posts of photos and videos of cats. 

 There were two events that started cats showing up in my art.  We have a black cat we found as a kitten, named Cleopatra and her interactions with our two Chihuahuas and our parrot started to creep into my art.  I took this ‘comedy show’ at home and shared it with my audience.  The black kitty that occasionally appears in my work is Cleo. 

The other “life event” that happened was my mom had to be moved to assisted living for dementia because she needed round the clock supervision.  An artist I follow, Carla Sonheim, had asked her followers if they would send her mom a postcard with cat art on it for her mom’s birthday.  I really liked that idea and started to mail my mom a daily cat postcard to give her something to look forward to everyday in the mails as way to help her settle in to her new home.  I shared the postcard cats on Instagram and Facebook and people liked them.

These postcards cats were fun, whimsical, humorous and I thought they would be the perfect match for Artful Antics. Two of the cats in the show are my mom’s cats and one is Cleo. The rest are either from sketches in my sketchbook or loose portraits of cats I found on Sktchy, an app where people post photos in the hope that an artist will use it and post what they created.