Blogging with Susan Wan Dolling: Opera Cats

I started painting what I call my “Opera Cats”— as in Peking Opera — when we moved to our current house because the plastic switch plates on the walls looked ugly to me. And once I started, I couldn’t stop! Now there are Opera Cats on my walls which are switch plates as well as single portraits and clocks with these creatures on them! Maybe it’s because I grew up with a cat but is now inexplicably allergic to them that I’ve taken to producing these theatrical cats. Maybe someday I’ll write stories about them. There is a story I can tell now though, a real life story about my allergy to cats:

My little boy was about five or six when he began asking for a pet. He came home one day after visiting a friend who had a cat, and he wanted one too. I told him no, sorry, because mummy is very allergic to cats. The next day, he came home from school, obviously having thought about this while he was away, and asked, “Mummy, could you be a neighbor?” And no, I didn’t move out, but we did eventually, after a couple of dwarf hamsters, graduated to having dogs instead.

Here are five of the Opera Cats on our dining room wall. They form a sort of Royal Family, let’s say, in the Tang dynasty, to go with My China in Tang Poetry, though cats came years ahead of the books.