The Model at Home: Sanmu’s Memoir 008

I have a photograph of Sanmu beside his own portrait.

He lies on the wooden floor with one front paw resting at the edge of the painting paper. The Sanmu on the paper is surrounded by pink roses, with one little paw showing too. Two round faces, one on the paper and one outside it. The painted eyes are wide and round, while the real Sanmu has one eye wider than the other and looks slightly unimpressed.

Of course, I do not know what he really thinks of his portrait. It is just that these two Sanmus together are quite interesting.

For someone who paints, having a cat brings a very practical benefit: there is a model at home.

Sanmu, however, is not exactly an easy model to paint.

His silver tabby coat looks silver-gray at first, but a closer look is more complicated. Black and white hairs alternate, with some brown mixed in, and the color is strongly affected by the surroundings. Sometimes it is cooler, sometimes warmer. It is the same cat, yet his coat feels different from one photograph to the next.

Call him gray, but use only one gray and it will not look like what is in front of you. The white parts are not quite white, and the dark markings must remain connected to the surrounding fur. After painting Sanmu, when I turn to cats with simpler coat colors, I realize my own cat really has set me a challenge.

Usually I begin with a warm gray wash, then layer brushstrokes, growing finer as I go, until the texture of the fur gradually appears. Explaining the details at length in words gets a little dull. A process video is more direct than a long explanation here.

Even so, I have painted Sanmu many times.

The photographs I take in everyday life leave plenty of material for painting. He is right there in my life. Looking today and looking again tomorrow, his face and markings grow more familiar. Beyond the reference photograph, I also know what this cat is like ordinarily. I did not have that before getting a cat.

Later, after enough conventional paintings from photographs, I began to get a little bored. I kept wondering whether I could give him a different look, add decorations, or try another theme.

Putting cats into famous paintings or dressing them as historical figures is nothing unusual. Many painters have done it, and I have seen similar work. For me, it was simply a wish to try things I wanted to paint on the familiar Sanmu.

For a while I really liked Mucha’s style, so I painted a series of Sanmus with flowers and decorative lines.

In one, large red flowers open beside his face, with curving lines over a yellow-green background and “SANMU” written at the top. Flowers and leaves crowd together in a lively bustle, while the face in the middle is very serious. In another, I have him standing upright, draped in orange-yellow fabric, bending a paw around a large bouquet. The same silver-gray fur, but with a new pose, he looks rather convincing.

Painting my own cat brings a certain ease. His appearance is familiar already, so I can put more thought into color and composition: which flowers suit this face, which background looks good beside it. If an experiment works, I go on to the next painting. In this way, Sanmu has gradually acquired quite a collection of looks on paper.

He probably has no idea how many jobs I have assigned him.

Later, these experiments also entered commissions for other pets. The same surrounding flowers feel different with a golden cat or a white long-haired cat. With different eyes, face shapes, and coats, there is room to rearrange the flowers and colors around them.

Looking back, this connects with my original reason for getting a cat.

I was already taking pet portrait commissions, but had never kept a pet. Clients sent photographs and I painted them, yet I always felt something of firsthand experience was missing from the conversation. So I thought I would get a cat, both to understand a little more of life with a pet and to paint my own in daily life.

Once Sanmu arrived, that thought slowly became concrete. He gave me a subject to observe every day and opportunities to keep trying new ways of painting. The resulting works then led me to paint more people’s pets.

Sanmu served as a kind of first example. Looking at that photograph now, the Sanmu on paper is surrounded by roses, and the Sanmu outside it casually rests a paw beside him. The model at home is most comfortable just like this.

I continue to take pet watercolor commissions. If you would like a portrait of your cat or dog, you are welcome to talk with me. We can look at the photographs first, I can hear you talk about your pet, and then we can think together about how to bring them into a painting.