I was asked to contribute to a painting exhibition where the brief was for the artists to interrogate ‘what painting is’ and ‘what painting is not’. I do not have a regular painting practice, which made it a bit easier to answer the brief.

The artwork I submitted is made of the reverse side of a missing cat poster (laminated A4) that has been exposed to the weather since August 2024. The pigment from the coloured inkjet photographs of the cat has bled through the paper, effectively creating a watercolour painting on the other side.

The gradual breakdown and abstraction of the cats through the page reminded me of Louis Wain’s cat paintings, and how over time as his mental health collapsed, they became more and more loose and psychedelic, eventually forming pure pattern, breaking free of being recognisable as cats at all.

The image below is by Louis Wain, called ‘Kaleidoscope Cats IV’.