After my labour-intensive building project with the previous painting in the "East Side Storeys" series, my frazzled mind again needed to hit "Pause" and figure out what I thought I was doing. And along came just the paws I needed.
Part of my frazzlement has to do with upheaval in the neighbourhood, including the impending loss of my comfortable next-door neighbours -- and the loss, already, of their aged cat Linus. That's been hard for me as Linus has been my antisocial garden companion (is that possible?) for 12 years – and of course, harder for them as it's followed on the loss of their adored dog, Bugsy the Pugsy.
One of this neighbour pair came over one day to pick up another dog of theirs I'd been dogsitting. (Not a story anyone wants to replay). He noticed all my paintings stacked around the living room and declared them to be "beautiful." Thanks! I'll take encouragement wherever I can get it. The next day, he came back to ask if I'd consider doing portraits of the cat, the dog, maybe the cat's long-gone sister.
Uh-oh. There's a pause and there are paws, and there's no guaranteed applause. I couldn't just say, "No." Instead, I suggested I'd do a trial run from one of my own photos, and we'd see if it landed in the realm of possibility. Here's my original photo – taken in March, three years ago.
Here we go again, dealing with lines and angles along the back fence on the laneway – and here's the first outline of Linus.
The view made his posture tricky, and I hadn't even reached his face. From my early 1980s life drawing classes, I remember a classmate asking my revered teacher if it was "harder or easier to do animals rather than humans." The remembered answer: "It is the same thing – you must consider gesture, anatomy, mood. You must pin down what you really want to do." And that brought me to this stage.
On to the forsythia – and it might be said this painting is more about spring's harbinger shrub than about Linus. Quite coincidentally, a surprise awaited me. I'd gone to the online Oxford English Dictionary to double-check pronunciation – another neighbour puts a "scythe" in the middle while I've always heard and said "sith." And there I found:--
Oh, yep. I know this guy – John Linnaeus Edward Whitridge Shecut, my many-times-great- grandfather. Scroll past the letter to Thomas Jefferson and you can read Shecut's full story. Some have even called him "eccentric," and what better ancestor to have?
Meanwhile, back to the doings on my Vancouver laneway and the final version of "Linus on Guard" (copyright 2025). My neighbour thought the face was a pretty good likeness and accepted it with thanks. He's thinking over another photo to send my way.
And trying to regain focus, I roam the neighbourhood, savouring forsythia and all kinds of spring blooms that have burst open in the suddenly sunny weather. There are more paws in evidence, too.
