WIP featuring phantom cat

Over the Summer our kid scratched the bottom of his foot running around barefoot in the yard, three small parallel scratches in the arch. I asked if he had stepped on a thorn. He said no. He said he thought there was a little cat hiding under a bush, and maybe it had reached out its paw and scratched him. When he had looked for the cat, it was gone–it had run away.

I am working on a series of pieces about our neighborhood, which is (for us) bucolic. This is the first one. I had a lot of false starts, because I keep thinking I should push myself to experiment with other media and techniques. But I always come crawling back to my labored pen and ink. When you are pretty good at one thing it's hard to work in any other way. It's hard to sit with feeling frustrated and amateurish all over again.

Hopefully for my next post I will have finished my Neighborhood series, with my kid and the cat in the center of it. In the meantime, here are several of my false starts.

When my kid saw these drawings he looked uneasy and said "I think maybe I didn't get scratched by a cat after all." That was too bad. Making art about something kills it, or at least dissipates it. I unintentionally killed the little cat he'd had in his mind.