Lost cat: found cat
A day in the life of an artist is not exclusively about putting paint on a canvas. Since finishing the eighth and final painting of a series from my trip to Australia last winter (2024/2025) I am busy making frames for the Oz series, I have installed a new hanging system in one of the galleries at FaMAS, delivered work to a gallery in Sheffield and produced a drawing for a recent commission.
The commission involves the story of a lost and found cat. At the end of August 2025 we adopted two Bengal cats, Ulysses (aged 4) and Freya (aged 7) from Cats Protection. On 31st October 2025 exactly 9 weeks after the adoption, Freya went missing. Following a huge effort to find her we had almost given up hope but almost 6 weeks from the day she went missing, Freya was home again.
Freya had been seen on a farm over a mile from our home and because of her unusual markings and her very vocal character two people working at the farm felt that she was very different to the feral cats that lived at the farm and was likely to be someone’s pet. They had seen Freya at the farm over a period of 5 days so her wehereabouts for the other 5 weeks remains a mystery. Freya was caught, taken to a local vet, her micro-chip was scanned and the vet telephoned my wife on 11th december 2025 with the wonderful news that she was alive and well.
We arranged to collect Freya that evening from the couple that had found her and taken her to the vet. We wanted to show our appreciation and I gave them my business card and told them that if they could find something they liked on my website-it was theirs. The following day I received a telephone call from the husband of the couple asking if I did commissions. He had seen the flyer we’d had printed on which there was a photograph of Ulysses and Freya together. His daughter had developed a soft spot for Freya during the very short time they’d had her and the gentleman wanted a drawing of Freya and Ulysses for his daughter. Unfortunately Ulysses was not at all welcoming towards Freya at first but over the last 4 weeks he has begun to recognise her and they are playing and sleeping together just as they were when we first met them. It has taken four weeks to find a satisfactory pose of them together..they often lie together on the back of a settee in the bay window but are consequently silhouetted against the light and thereby merely dark shapes against the window. At last Ulysses and Freya together in a reasonable light.
