cats

This past Saturday I teamed up with Charlie Slick, musician and inventor, to paint this award winning painting during a live art performance. Charlie made a giant Spirograph, which worked impeccably to create that background pattern, and then I painted a cat.



It's 4 feet tall and makes an excellent centerpiece for any room.

We were set up in a basement bar in Ypsilanti underneath a Mongolian Barbecue. There were 3 other artists there, and a screen printer. The girl next to us had art that had a lot of feelings and was very "political." She made a painting of the basement bar we were in and everyone standing around in it. Except she also added green alien guys into the crowd. That was her artistic license. Next to her there was this guy sitting at a tiny table with headphones on painting this weird line drawing on a canvas. He didn't look up or talk to anyone the whole time. I don't know what his deal was.

On the other side of us there was this girl doing "live model painting" where she painted on these two dudes. For the first part of the night she was just sitting in a chair waiting for her models to get there and we weren't sure what her deal was either. Then some guy came and climbed up on the chair wearing only his underwear and she painted a sun on him. I got uncomfortable while she was painting his underwear right over his junk. It was right next to us. Then another guy came and she painted a moon on him. Sun and moon, cool. She was using acrylic paint on those guys and I don't know if you have ever had acrylic paint painted on your skin but when it dries it totally sucks. Those guys probably really hated her then. Maybe that was part of the art too.

People were pretty into our piece when we were doing the spirograph part. We were trying to pace ourselves because we were gonna be there for 5 hours so we took our time and tried to make each step really important. No one else tried to pace themselves and they all finished before us. The joke turned out to be on us because then all the audience left and went to go stand in front of the weird DJ or sit by the bar.

So then I painted the cat and a few people looked at me, which was weird. I usually hate painting in front of people but I guess painting a giant cat in a girl outfit is different. Some guy came by and told me that it was pretty good but if I wanted it to be great I should make the cat be "suckling on a divine breast." And then said some things about bishops. I think he was trying to be funny.

I said, yeah ok buddy. That's not how jokes work.