23rd July 2026. Continuing the cat theme.

At the top is my own photo of our household’s matriarch and Empress of all she surveys, and beneath it a tracing in black watercolour pencil, wetted, then applied to the canvas, finally reverting it to its original orientation. Here, it’s sitting in puddles of water and colour with floods and deserts, which is where I left it overnight.

This is one of those unexpected results that makes me take a step back (and likely has some folk trawling social media for an exorcist). Whether in its original orientation or the new one, there is more than one cat in the picture, and many more eyes than seems entirely right. I’m sitting with this for a while, largely because I feel I should do something with it and also that I should leave it alone, and the problem here is the amount of agency I had in creating the end result. So I’m asking myself, as the maker of this piece, how much ownership do I have given there was little creative intent in the way it turned out. Does providing the setting conditions, albeit experimentally and with no notion of the outcome, qualify me to claim that I directed this small overnight drama? Is it enough to take credit for setting the experimental process in motion and that what happened has populated my artist’s kit box with another tool? Not to mention my perpetual bugbear – knowing when to leave something alone?

The original profile of the cat is there in the image below, if you know there is one and where to look for it. But in the rotated one above, the cat that emerges is not only demonic but surrounded by other cats at various angles with pinpoint eyeballs and seemingly emerging from something that might be a worryingly evil cat fermenting pot.

I might try cleaning up the edges of the canvas a little. I’d intended a black background for this as per the Quantum Cats, so the smudges were inconsequential, but this has changed and requires some thought, for the original at least; the digital version is easier to edit.

The image above shows acrylic white in a broad horizontal band across the top of the small canvas with another broad band beneath it, this time of pouring acrylic which has successfully matched the base canvas and so will be my choice for masking the smudges, one dilute layer at a time.

In the end, I masked only minimally because I could see how this process was changing the nature of the raw canvas. The photos are evening blue, so I’ll need to take some more tomorrow.

The close-up (above) doesn’t work for me; I think it needs to sit in the space like a Gordian knot materialising in the fabric of a sail. But I’ll leave them here for course purposes.

25th July 2026 – thank you iPhone for enabling removal of the blue cast on this image.

Untitled as yet.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2026