Inspirations: Cats In Art

As you can imagine, I looked at a lot of cat pictures for inspiration while I was writing Varjak Paw!  So I wanted to share some of them with you this week.

This first one is by Rudyard Kipling.  He drew it to illustrate his story 'The Cat That Walked By Himself', which is one of the Just So Stories.  Kipling's one of my favourite writers, and this is definitely one of my all-time favourite cat pictures!

Cats have a very long history in human art; we've been making images of them for thousands of years.  Here's an ancient Egyptian cat - a statue of Bastet, the cat goddess.

This one's a mosaic from 2nd century Rome; it shows a cat hunting a bird.

And here's a 19th century Japanese woodblock print, by the great Ando Hiroshige.  I love how he captures the way cats watch the world.

Of course, there's been lots of cat photography too.  My favourite cat photographer is Ylla, who made this fantastic image.  I must have looked at it more than any other single image when I was writing Varjak and Outlaw - somehow, I feel it goes right to the essence.

But for me, Dave McKean's pictures are right up there with the very best.  This page is from his brilliant comic Cages.  I read it long before I wrote Varjak Paw; and when my publisher asked me who I thought drew good cats, my first and only thought was "Dave McKean!"

It's still amazing to me that he illustrates my books; I never get tired of looking at his art.  I can't wait to show you what he's been doing for Phoenix - it is absolutely incredible!!!

Research: Catwatching

Another thing I'll be doing in this blog is sharing some of my research with you.  So here's a book that helped me write Varjak Paw: Catwatching, by Desmond Morris.

It was very important to me that the cats in Varjak should be as much like real cats as possible.  So I did a lot of research into cat behaviour and body language, and of all the books I read (there were many!), this one was the most helpful:

Morris really gives you a sense of what it must be like to be a cat, and to experience the world through a cat's senses - most of them much sharper than human senses.  For example, he tells us:

"Humans in the prime of life can hear noises up to about 20,000 cycles per second.  Dogs can manage up to about 35,000 to 40,000 cycles per second, so that they are able to detect sounds that we cannot.  Cats, on the other hand, can hear sounds up to an astonishing 100,000 cycles per second...  This acoustic ability explains why cats sometimes appear to have supernatural powers.  They hear and understand the ultrasonic sounds that precede a noisy activity and respond appropriately before we have even realized that something unusual is going to happen."

The book is packed with this kind of information; Morris answers almost every question you could have about cats, sometimes very surprisingly.  If you enjoyed Varjak Paw, I can highly recommend it!