Images from chaos

The third exercise for Deb Weiers's class is to make a background and then to sit with it, observe it, and see what emerges. As in, are there people's features buried within the scribbles and zigzags of the gouache underlayer begging to come out? Are there little critter faces peeking at you between the colors you mixed and spread and flung about? If so, find them and reveal them!

I must confess I was skeptical of this process...and then I saw the first cat. And the second cat. And the third cat.... The more I squinted and scanned the page, the more revealed themselves to me. So I started sketching them in with white pen, and then I discovered that they weren't only cats, they were some of them cat gods—a cat buddha, the goddess Bastet, the Mayan leopard god, and a few others whose provenance might be sketchy but whose regal attitude required recognition. So many, in fact, that they began crowding one another off the page. So I gave each of them the forms they had chosen, overlapped them where necessary, and filled up the page with "Cats and Deities."

Here is the first stage, with just the background and the first few cats to reveal themselves to me, just so you can see the process:

And here is the finished piece, in which the gods have emerged in a sort of Chagall-like floaty night sky.

It's a bit messy and confusing, but I didn't have the heart to do what I probably should have, which is to edit out a few in favor of clarity for the others, and then black in the background to highlight them. I'll have to try that technique (which is actually part of Lesson Three) later, when personalities aren't fighting to see the light, and also when I receive my order of black gouache from my friend Dick Blick, because I don't think India ink would have been a sufficient blackout medium.

Gesso, Daler Rowney acrylic inks, watercolors, LuminArté fluorescent paints, Uniball, gel pens, on 140-lb. Fluid watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.