Genesis

 I got really hooked on art in junior high and high school. Unlike a lot of people, I was lucky enough to attend a secondary school where art was both appreciated and well funded. I left high school not only knowing about things like perspective and color theory, but also about the Great Masters and how to throw a pot on a wheel. In college I was too busy to do much other than pick up what art classes I could fit into my schedule, and when I graduated, I found myself too busy with teaching to make much art. I was living in Korea the first time I decided to draw a cat. There were several motivating factors behind this decision. For one thing, our apartment needed art, and I wasn't interested in decorating it with some overly done and overly copied Chinese brush painting. I wanted something personal. Also, I had a lot of time on my hands as a newly minted ex-pat wife, unemployed for the first time since grad school. What I didn't have was my own personal style, so I decided to take a page from art history and try to teach myself by "copying" the masters. Of course, being an academic, I have strong feelings about intellectual property rights and didn't want to flat out copy anyone, so my first cat was heavily influenced by the style of Franz Marc, but is partially posed from  "the world is too much for me" pose so frequently adopted by my models. What I learned from this: I love charcoal, I love the graceful lines of cats, and I needed some color in the next piece! Also, I really like the results of using charcoal to draw on a canvas that has several layers of acrylic paint on it.