Bessie

“Bessie”

This sprang to life from multiple sources. A favorite sculpture of mine is The Capitoline Wolf (5th century BC) which depicts a she-wolf suckling Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus. It combines exquisite beauty and ferociousness. This painting then hit a dead-end and I could not find my way for a long time. At one point I resorted to making burn marks through the oil paint and into the wood to try and find a path forward. Eventually, one of my cats became the catalyst for the painting by its compositional placement and also its demeanor and disarming pose. Bessie is the cat’s name.