Cats Cradle

One of my favourite watering holes is Southsea Coffee Co in Osborne Road. Martyn and Tara's approach is warm and open; they seriously love their coffee, home-made healthy food and celebrate their love of art with, among other things a wall in the snug given over to muraling by a number of local artists. Over the last two years the wall has been painted by around ten or so different artists, in as many different styles.

 Having spent the majority of this year making art for other people, I was chuffed when my friend Midge agreed to collaborate on a mural for the Southsea Coffee Co wall. (We have a tacit agreement to collab on a joint show at some indeterminate point in the future, and this will either spur us on to that, or it will satisfy that idea in one hit). So, over a coffee one morning we sketched up an idea on a napkin - as you do, and got the go ahead.


For a while, Midge had her studio in the basement at SSCCo and naturally became something of an 'accidental' resident artist. Midge's figures and creatures are beautiful, evocative and mysterious. 'Mysterious' seems such a weak adjective to describe them, but they have a wonderful air of ethereal inscrutability that is genuinely mysterious. 
(Check out her Big Cartel shop HERE.)

We've barely strayed from our original concept. Midge drew a few doodles of these cats hanging from red threads and I was immediately taken with them; their connotations of 'cat's cradle' and the strangeness of their putti-like forms. They have a rich, fluid sense of movement which compliments their expressions perfectly. 


I chose to set these in a landscape that is dark and brooding; wintery but open, that still radiates from reflected light. The original of this was a charcoal drawing that I'd done on a piece of driftwood a year or so ago. Here, because it is painted, I was free to play with more expressive, looser brushwork and thinner paint to let some of the light shine through from below, and I think it's given the painting a greater depth of field, and a vibrancy. Painting with a single colour, plus black, with very little white/light grey gives a solid structure and strength to the landscape; the light and airy mountains anchored to the plain by the clumps of trees.

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