Well I found a pile of old, faded photographs and wondered how hard it would be to turn old photographs into art. The original photographs were taking on 35 mm film but the negatives are long gone. The photographs were faded but the composition on most of them was good and I decided it would be fun to try and do something with them and add them to my offer in my gallery. So this weekend I have been working on old cat and dog photographs.
My cat and dog images are very popular and I wanted to offer clients a cohesive collection so that they could mix and match. So I decided that I would create the whole series to have the same look, opting for an impressionist style. I started with cats first as I have many photographs of cats available to work from and they are a subject I love working with. Cats make such good subjects and just taking photographs is a challenge as they are so unpredictable.
I try to capture the character of the individual cat – non-cat people don’t appreciate that each cat is unique and, just as with people, they have their own personalities. The ‘Cat Collage’ shown here gives you an idea of the style of the images that are so far available from the fruits of my labours and I have many more to upload. I seem to have cats in just about every colour combination imaginable!
Of course I also have dogs so I have been working on images of Ringo and Spud our two puppies. But before Ringo and Spud there were other dogs and one of the dogs whose photographs I have been working with is my little long haired chihuahua Holly. Apart from being pretty and cute (as she well knew) she was also a good model for me and appears in many paintings as well as photographs. It was lovely to come across an old stash of images of Holly and turning those old photographs into art.
I have also enjoyed writing the stories for each of these images.
Take ‘A Cat is Waiting’ for example. As mentioned in another blog, in Italy a black cat is unlucky. The original photograph for this image was taken some time ago at the Rifugio per Gatti Cinni in Arezzo, Italy and so the story behind this image is how long will the little black cat have to wait to be homed? Will he be lucky? I guess we will never know.
Before you go
My name is Dorothy Berry-Lound an artist and writer. You can find out more about my art and writing at https://dorothyberryloundart.com.
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Thank you for reading!
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