Even though cats seem to rule the internet, I agree with Svetlana Petrova that we need more classical art with cats.
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Bored Pandareached out to Svetlana, who kindly shared more about the story behind how she first conceived the idea for FatCatArt and what inspired her to blend classic masterpieces with the whimsical presence of her orange cat.“My first inspiration was my cat, Zarathustra. I met this extremely talented cat when I adopted him after my mother passed away. It was actually Zarathustra who saved me from the subsequent depression. My mom loved the cat so much, and I think that is why he developed such a sensitive personality. He decided himself to become a model and performance artist. He adored posing for photos. He made such coquettish poses and clever faces as if to say: ‘Paint me like these French girls…’ So I did.”
Bored Pandareached out to Svetlana, who kindly shared more about the story behind how she first conceived the idea for FatCatArt and what inspired her to blend classic masterpieces with the whimsical presence of her orange cat.
“My first inspiration was my cat, Zarathustra. I met this extremely talented cat when I adopted him after my mother passed away. It was actually Zarathustra who saved me from the subsequent depression. My mom loved the cat so much, and I think that is why he developed such a sensitive personality. He decided himself to become a model and performance artist. He adored posing for photos. He made such coquettish poses and clever faces as if to say: ‘Paint me like these French girls…’ So I did.”
“I am a professional artist and made a lot of different projects before Fat Cat Art. After my mother’s death, I got hard depression, and I was unable to make something creative for about 2 years. And it was Zarathustra who saved me from this depression.
A friend of mine once told me: ‘Why you don’t do any art with your new cat Zarathustra, he is so funny!’ And he was: he was fat, my mother spoiled him immensely, it is her words on the site, that he is ‘the best cat in the world’.
In my childhood with my mother, we went to the Hermitage Museum every weekend.
Svetlana also told us more about her charming orange cat Zarathustra.
“Zarathustra was a natural born artist and he knew he was making art, and he was always very friendly to photographers, he knew who a photographer was and began to flatter to these people, amazing, how he knew!
Unfortunately, Zarathustra passed away on 16 December 2021 from pancreatitis at 16 years old… But he is still alive via my art. I have so many photos of him on my computer, and I am creating new paintings with him. Being part of the immortal digital world, Zarathustra stays alive in my art.This is what I feel about it.
“Now I have 2 cats, David Bowie, who already took part in artworks with Zarathustra, like ‘What If Ophelia Had Cats?’, and “Cats in Almond Blossoms” and Tyger Blake who just started his way in art “The Wounded Angel with their Cat” , “Twelve Sunflowers and Two Cats”.
I adopted him from a rescue in memory of Zarathustra. After Zarathustra passed away all my friends began to send me info about cats who needed to be adopted, they knew Zarathustra would be glad that I adopted a rescue cat. And when I saw the photos of the little ginger guy with a very emotional face and surprised eyes, Zarathustra whispered to me ‘It’s time’. This is how Tyger Blake came into my life. He came to me and Zarathustra’s heartbroken bro David Bowie, my other cat, just before Valentine’s Day, making it a true love day for us.
‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful (oops, fluffy) symmetry?’
The answer to William Blake’s question ‘what shoulder, & what art, could twist the sinews of thy heart?’ is Zarathustra! I am sure it was Zarathustra who sent us his fluffy emanation.
We were wondering about the creative process that Svetlana goes through to recreate the paintings. She shared how she selects which masterpieces to reinterpret, and what are the steps involved in digitally inserting cats.
“Fat Cat Art is an innovative art project that integrates painting, photography, and digital art.
Now, Tyger Blake the cat follows the steps of his great predecessor.
FatCatArt images are created in Photoshop.
I have more than 20,000 photos of my cats on my computer. I photoshop the cat carefully into a famous painting’s digital image. It’s a challenge, he has to fit perfectly into a masterpiece, in position, in expression, and sometimes it takes months to get the right photo. I print my works and paint them, emulating the style of the great masters, to make the cat’s image look very natural in well-known masterpieces.”
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“In these historical surroundings, Zarathustra still stays a contemporary internet kitty, a meme, a ‘LOLcat’. In his version of the Mona Lisa, you see a girl with a cat posing for a photographer at the balcony. The cat is bored and wants to escape. Everybody has seen this scene somewhere! The mysterious Joconde from the 16th C becomes a modern city girl, who is fond of cats, the internet, and selfies. And now we have an absolutely different portrait. Thus, my cat introduces modern people to the history of art in a cute and funny way and shows that everybody can be creative, even a cat!
My digital originals are high-resolution multi-layered .psd image files. Sizes of original image files go up to 2 GB, 20 000 px size. As FatCatArt originals are electronic files, they are changeable: the artist can change details, color appearance, update the original painting image, or change the cat’s photo. Thus the pieces stay alive, they can be definitely finished only with the death of the artists.
For an exhibition, my digital pieces are printed on natural canvas for painting, and then I finish them manually with a brush, applying texture gels and oil colors, including very rare historical pigments made of precious stones such as lapis lazuli, for example, it is a very important color in Vermeer’s Milkmaid. Thus images look like real historical paintings, even in texture and color appearance, and it seems that a master of the past painted a cat in it.
Choosing the artwork to remake goes in 2 directions: or the photo of the cat reminds me of a famous painting, or I have a painting in my mind, and try to take a photo that would fit in it.
It’s no wonder that people on Instagram praise Svetlana’s work. However, we wanted to know what has been the most surprising or memorable response the artist received from viewers of FatCatArt.
Svetlana also shared a list of her all-time favorite artists: “Many of them! Vincent Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, Hieronymus Bosch, Edward Hopper… I love every artist that I remade!”
And lastly, she added: “Adopt a cat.”
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