Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Featured Artwork: Conversation With a Daisy

pencil portrait of cat with daisies
“Conversation With a Daisy”, pencil on cream cotton paper, 9″ x 12″, 2004 © B.E. Kazmarski

I call pencil “my first and favorite medium”. My mother was a newspaper crossword puzzle fan and I’ve been sketching in pencil since I picked up one of her readily-sharpened No. 2 pencils with the yellow paint and the pink eraser and began to make lines on one of her lined 3″ x 5″ index cards. I actually remember doing this and watching myself make the lines; I have no idea how old I was but I believe I was in kindergarten or first grade. Fast forward a few years and I sat on our dining room table looking out the window at the gnarled crabapple tree in the snow, No. 2 pencil in hand and a piece of blank paper, trying capture the bare tree against the snow, learning the many things a pencil could do.

Detail of Conversation With a Daisy, cat with daisies
Detail of Conversation With a Daisy, just Namir.

And from that beginning I often say that “I can speak in pencil”, that what goes in my eyes and comes out the tip of the pencil has very little logical translation much as you would speak fluently in more than one language. I see the scene, and I see the pencil drawing. That’s also one of the reasons you’ll see so many of my daily sketches in pencil, and I have a huge body of works in pencil featuring my cats, commissioned portraits, wildlife, landscapes, waterscapes and flowers.

So when I saw Namir stretching his entire slender self up toward a downward-facing daisy I looked at his crisp gray fur with its muted stripes, his graceful curving figure, the simplicity of the daisies and immediately decided I had to do a pencil sketch entitled “Conversation With a Daisy”.

I had carried in an armload of my Shasta daisies that had been knocked over in a summer storm and put them in the crystal vase on the kitchen cabinet, always a risk in a house of cats who ate nearly all green things but who considered freshly-cut flowers a special treat. One of them had indeed been bent and was facing downward. Seeing Namir I snapped several photographs, but he would not stretch himself out again and sniff that daisy! “I already did that, I don’t have to do it again, cats only sniff things once and then they know all about them,” he said. So much for me, but I know how to get my models into the positions I need, and this one was easy: hold any object above his head in about the position the daisy had been—snap! Sketch.

When I look at scenes like my kitchen it’s when I really mean it when I say, “That’s why we have art.” I can use only what I need of the original scene, and still you see my point of inspiration, plus no one really needs to see my cluttered little kitchen.  But it’s not only about being able to leave things out; these choices are part your aesthetic decision about what’s truly important to your statement. In this case, it was Namir’s exploration of the daisy, and briefly I considered leaving out the bunch of daisies and the vase too, but I liked the interaction between his shape and the vase.

Working in pencil I can also express details either with strength, like Namir’s fur, using both texture and opacity for you to understand what I see, or with subtlety, like the barely outlined curve of his cheek and the whisps of his whiskers curving upward toward the daisy in curiosity, just enough quick lines to see the fur on the curve of his chest.

Detail of Conversation With a Daisy, cat with daisy.
Detail of Conversation With a Daisy, Namir meets the daisy.

One of the things I enjoy about pencil is the expressiveness of the lines you can make, and this simple drawing makes use of not only a soft pencil lead similar to that old No. 2 but also harder leads that make lighter but cleaner lines, and I’ve also used the point of an extremely sharp pencil, a slightly dulled pencil and the full side of the pencil to create detail and texture, and even combinations of all of these in one simple line as you can see rounding his left whisker pad, above.

I do love flowers, and I don’t give myself enough of a chance to draw and paint them—partly because I’m usually outside tending to them instead. But in this case, along with comparing the two shapes of Namir and the vase, it was another reason to include the vase of daisies in the drawing. As with Namir, I didn’t draw every daisy in the vase or even every petal, in fact they are a little rough and sketchy up close, but overall you get the sense of daisies when you look at them. I looked for the details that stood out most to me, and that was the stems with their tiny leaves, and the positions of the flowers and their petals.

Detail of Conversation With a Daisy, the daisies
Detail of Conversation With a Daisy, the daisies.
Detail of Conversation With a Daisy, the crystal vase.
Detail of Conversation With a Daisy, the crystal vase.

And I also don’t take enough time to sketch just everyday objects, though I study and photograph them all the time.  How to work with the complexity of a bunch of daisy stems refracted through the facets of flowers and leaves cut into the crystal vase? Again, look for shadows and light, and recognizable shapes.

I sketched this in 2004 and framed it then. Namir’s idiopathic cystitis began causing issues as his heart murmur increased, and while we never knew if they were related, he began to suffer occasional bladder infections and needed to be hospitalized and catheterized, not from the usual crystals in his urine, but because of swelling, somewhere along the line. My veterinarian and others who treated him guessed that he’d picked up a herpes virus when he’d been an outdoor unneutered kitty at the beginning of his life and it settled somewhere in his urinary tract.

In order to help pay his bill for all the testing and treatment I “raffled” this sketch and a friend won it.

His condition continued on. Because of his heart murmur and developing hypertrophic cardiomyopathy we had to be extra careful of any treatments and of the possible retention of fluid since he was already showing some fluid build up around his heart. In August 2005 he suffered his first round of congestive heart failure and this persistent bladder issue was a huge concern, but after he’d been on a diuretic for a while he would still have infections and urinary issues, but never came near blocking again. Not sure if trading one thing for the other was worth it, but with all that Namir managed to live to be 15 years old with his sense of humor fully intact. No one who met him ever had any idea that his health was so precarious, and for all the really painful treatments he endured, all the veterinarians and technicians at the specialist and emergency hospital welcomed him for a “visit” and I often read in his medical reports how he loved “face scunches” and kisses, and how he sat on someone’s desk and laid all over the papers.

Where to find this sketch

Feline Sketches Fine Art Correspondence
Feline Sketches Fine Art Correspondence

I have this sketch in a set of notecards called “Feline Sketches”, a collection of this and other pencil sketches from years past offset printed on acid-free cream cover with matching envelopes as well as writing paper. You’ll also see memo pads, but I only have a few left and I need to reprint.

These cards are printed offset, meaning that ink is applied to a plate, and that plate is applied to the piece of paper, not the type of digital reproduction I use for my full-color cards and prints. Pencil is not truly black, and when I’d reproduced my pencil sketches using ink in the past they often looked like charcoal sketches instead.

When I had these printed the printer and I did tests to match the ink to the pencil drawings and used Warm Gray 9 ink instead of black ink and I’m very pleased with the outcome. In this one, Namir’s fur looks just like Namir’s fur did, and it looks so much like my original sketch that, printed on the same cream paper, it’s hard to tell them apart.

A few veterinary hospitals purchase my animal sympathy cards, and while they also purchase the more designed 5″ x 7″ greeting cards, a few also choose a selection of these, and I use them as well myself.

At the time I had them printed I had also had a limited number of prints made, like 10 each, in ink on cream cotton cover of each of the images you see at right, and I will get around to that sometime again soon.


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All images used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission. Please ask if you are interested in using one in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of this image or a product including this image, check my Etsy shop or Fine Art America profile to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit Ordering Custom Artwork for more information on a custom greeting card, print or other item.


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Bernadette

From health and welfare to rescue and adoption stories, advocacy and art, factual articles and fictional stories, "The Creative Cat" offers both visual and verbal education and entertainment about cats for people who love cats, pets and animals of all species.

3 thoughts on “Featured Artwork: Conversation With a Daisy

  • Pingback: New Hello kitty thing. ♥ | Hope & Dream & Wait

  • maru clavier

    This is so, so beautiful. the concept and the way you put it in paper. I live with a feline boy that loves flowers and this drawing made me smile, changing the feline shape caould be him at any moment flowers are availabe at home.

    Reply

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