Painting in 2014

http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/

I've been trying new things this year, such as teaching a class on the basics of acrylic painting in February... For that, I had to figure out something everyone could relate to as a painting subject, and I settled on birds.  You can see on the left, it's in a style I thought I left behind years ago,  realism....

And following that, I started trying out other paintings in a more realistic fashion... I guess after you stay away from it for really long, it's all new again!
I figure, why limit myself?  I'm versatile, so I might as well move in any direction I please.
I'm posting here a cross section of where I've gone this year as a painter. As you can see, I'm not sticking to one area!

What We Do To Our Cats!

I saw the funniest thing last night and it reminded me of one of the reasons why I have cats as pets.  Of course, I have cats because I love them, they are affectionate, interesting and fun to pet...
Also, I found after my eighteen year old cat died a couple of years ago, I just couldn't sleep well at night without that feeling of a cat in the room. Weird!  The room felt less comfortable, odd to say.

Anyway, back to what reminded me about why I have cats at all... And the answer is, comic relief!
Sometimes, they do things that are just downright hilarious... 
So, basically, you are sitting there, minding your own business, and the animal that always lands on it's feet, doesn't.

Or, the epitome of grace that walks among us, walks, and is definitively not graceful...
And when they go off the rails, they are so totally shocked and appalled by what is happening, that it only adds to how funny the situation is!

Have you ever seen a cat fall backwards off a coffee table?  Their expression is priceless!  That's what I witnessed yesterday, and boy, I didn't stop laughing for ten minutes!
The other thing that's pretty entertaining what we do to them... They are so stiff with dignity, I don't think pet owners can really resist it!
I have a yearly tradition of putting these antlers I bought at a pet store years ago on whatever cats don't move fast enough to avoid me... (Yes, I tend to do this every year!)
But nowadays, you don't even have to do this type of thing yourself! 
The Internet is full of YouTube videos of cats in embarrassing situations, and they are funny, some incredibly so.
I feel sorry for the cats, but on some level, I know they deserve it;-)

My Cat Is A Mime...

Today, I'm going to talk about my cat! 

Her name is Nikki and she's a pretty ordinary tabby, as far as tabbies go, in that she lives in my house and never goes outside except to see her 'friend' the vet or to move to a new house. 

 

She's seventeen years old, so she experienced the nineties in her own feline fashion and wasn't so impressed...  No Wall street speculation for Nikki or working in an office wearing sneakers to work trying to make ends meet;-)
 

The 2000's weren't much different for her either, she didn't discover new music groups that she liked or pare down her lifestyle to make herself  'lean and mean'...  In fact, that cat gained weight as the decade went on!  So much for 'doing less with more', Nikki didn't get the last decade at all!

There is one pretty strange thing about Nikki though, she has a birth defect in her vocal cords that interferes with her ability to make any sounds... 

For the first year of her life she never made a single sound at all other than scratching the appliances to hear the sound of her claws or shaking her tail on plastic to hear it rattle! 

I used to call her the 'Mime cat' because it was pretty funny to see a cat go through the motions of meowing with no audio track turned on.  Mind you, there does seem to be some sort of cosmic compensation going on here, as you can hear that cat purr from across the room!

Later on in life, she figured out ways to get around the sound issues a bit... 

Now she stretches her neck up to finally get a strangled sort of drawn out meow out when she really feels the need to be heard...  Sort of a cat version of baying at the moon.

Since it really sounds somewhat like a cat in trouble she generally gets a good reaction, so she must figure it's worth the effort...  Personally, I'd like to find her volume control and turn it back off!  She was pretty well perfect the other way as far as I was concerned!

Did you ever stop and think about cats?  I'm convinced that they see the world very differently than we do, they're pretty sure that they own us and we are staff! 

On top of that, I have a sneaking suspicion that my cat thinks that the level of service has degraded in recent years... She was pretty annoyed by moving from the west coast of Canada out to the east coast.  Nowadays, if you bring out a box and start packing it, she'll look at you like she'd like to give you a little bite to get you to stop... 

I don't blame her though, I figured it out recently and over the last seventeen years, she's moved approximately half a dozen times.  For a cat, that's a lot, they aren't the most flexible pets...  Especially if you consider that she's made the trip by truck across Canada four times!

I remember a funny joke circulating the Internet years ago that I thought was hilarious...  The joke was showing what went on in the minds of dogs and cats with regards to how they see their lives...

--> For the dog, it was all oh boy, a walk, my favourite!  Oh boy, dog food, my favourite! Oh boy... You get the idea...

For the cat, it read like a conspiracy novel! 

The cat went on and on about how the person that was keeping them prisoner was torturing them with horrible gruel while keeping all the good stuff (meat dishes) for themselves...  And on top of that, their captors were eating it in front of them!  It went on to talk about how their latest attempt at assinating their captors failed when they didn't suceed at tripping them to fall down the stairs...  It was pretty funny and I think they caught some truth there!  And I'm a dyed in the wool cat person!  HaHa!

I'm pretty sure my cat would agree!  I think my Mime cat actually thinks she's a tiger...  I'd hate to tell her she's a bit short.

Images by Teresa Young:
1. Tiger Tracks -Apr.2004,  2. Nikki Smiles - 2009,  3. Nikki in her natural state - 2009,  4. Howling (Yawning) at the moon - 2009,  5.  Nikki's Self Image - May 2010.