Name of Piece: Cats playing a Poker Game
Title: Cats playing Poker
|
Title: Cats playing Poker
|
Cassius Marcellus Coolidge was born in 1844 and despite creating one of the most iconic series of paintings in pop culture, “Dogs Playing Poker”, he is largely unknown as an artist. Coolidge did not have any formal education in art and was working a few different jobs before becoming an artist. He first started off by creating “comic foregrounds' ' also known as photo stand-in. Comic foregrounds are boards with a picture or painting with holes for people to stick their head in, found mostly in carnivals or large attractions. It was in 1903 when he started working at Brown and Bigelow. This was also the start of his Dogs Playing Poker series. It's unknown where he first got the idea for the series but it is believed that he was inspired by artists such as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Paul Cezanne with their own paintings of scenes involving card games.
|
The Dogs Playing Poker series is a collection of 18 paintings by Coolidge with the most popular being the one titled A Friend In Need (1903). These paintings as stated before have become iconic in pop culture with Coolidge being parody by artists such as snoop dog for an album cover. There is a debate at where Coolidge work falls, many critics calling it Kitsch which is art that has an appeal to popular or uncultivated taste because of their low quality or tackiness. The point of Coolidge was to be satire or be humorous and exaggerated so it does contain many saturated colors.
|
To plan for this project I used some pictures of cats, one of my own cats, some from alleyway cats and the first one was an online image I found since I needed a cat pose from a side view. The one in the bow is my own cat and I thought the expression on their face was hilarious also it breaks a bit of the fourth wall in the painting since the cat is staring at the audience. |
For my first planning page, I wrote about Coolidge and most of the information I gathered about the artist. Most of this information I covered in the Inspiration section but there are a few facts I did not mention such as the fact that some of the paintings had a narrative to them with one being the painting Sitting Up with a Sick Friend. By narrative I mean that there are multiple paintings that Coolidge made including the same dog family. Among these works the one that stuck out the most to me was Poker Game (1894) which caught my attention due to the small enclosed feeling the painting gives with the small table but also the cool green color used for the table and background. |
At this point I was developing my idea which was in the simplest of terms was instead of dogs playing poker it was going to be cats playing. I originally wanted to make a artwork centering around the cats because of the ridiculous amounts of cats that live in the alleyway near my home. While thinking of ways I could include them in an artwork I thought of the Dogs Playing Poker series and that was where this idea stemmed from. In my second page of planning I sketched out the poses for the cats referencing pictures. I did question a few things such as how the glasses in the original painting Poker Game defied physics and how I was going to paint the small poker chips which I will get back to in the process section.
|
For my third page for my playing was mostly just the final sketch I made of the different cats sitting around the poker table. For this sketch I did use the grid method in order to get the placement of the furniture for the final product. Though before I made this sketch I did a little photoshop on the original painting adding in the cats pictures over the dogs heads in order to get better placement of the cats in the composition. |
My first step in doing this project was to make a grid on the illustration board to make up with the sketch I made. There was some space left on one side of the board due to the proportion of the original painting which I later on used to experiment with the different colors I had in gouache. After finishing the grid I transferred the sketch I made to the illustration board. I did change a few small features from the sketch to the board, most of it being the correcting feature on the face or tweaking the expression a bit.
|
I started off by painting the background since it was the largest empty space in the illustration and least complicated. On the sides I quickly made swatches the colors I mixed before applying them. I also decided to work from lighter to darker colors. though I think I underestimated how saturated the gouache paints could be since the darkest shadows in the illustration are still very vibrant like the dark green used as the shadow in the background. Continuing with the painting I started painting the table as well as going back and adding more dark shadows to the curtains. I started with the cushions first because the wood on the seats needed smaller, more precise strokes of gouache compared to the cushions.
|
In this section, there is a larger jump in progress. To the table, I added a slightly lighter tone of green compared to the background and added shadows to the clothes. I continued to add darker shadows around the background like the curtain and the top of the painting frame. I also started the process of painting the cat starting with a very light coat of gouge and working to make it darker. The only exception to this was the lids around the eyes which I made black to stick out. They also seem to serve on making the eyes of the cats pop.
|
I continued to add more texture to the cats overlaying different layers of gouache for all of the cats. For the cat on the far left, I used some colored pencils to add some smaller textures to the fur. I did add a few layers of gouache onto the layer of colored pencils so they want too much of a difference but it's obvious that there are smaller lines used for the texture compared to the others. In making the cats I did try to follow Coolidge's way of making texture on the dogs in the original piece Poker Game though I was limited due to gouache being semi-transparent making it a bit harder to make the same textures.
|
To finish the piece I just needed to complete the smaller details such as cards and poker chip. This for me it was hard painting the smaller objects such as the cards due to the fact that they very small and that it was looking very messy. So I cut out most of the poker chips out of the illustration near the cards. The only other thing to mention is for the glasses that I used acrylic paint too paint them on because the gouache paints were too translucent. Other than that the work is complete.
|
For the experimentation on this project some of it consisted of color swatches I made on the sides of the illustration on the board. I mostly did this in order to test the colors out since I had extra space on the sides of the board due to the proportion of the original painting. Another part of the experimentation was with the cats themselves. For the gray almost black cat I did experiment with the gouache and colored pencil adding a layer of black and white colored pencil to create more detailed fur on the body. For the other gray cat I only used gouache for the body. Looking both side by side there is a difference in texture with the gray cat on the right having more noticeable large brushstrokes while the cat to the left seems to have smaller overlaid textures.
|