Monkey & Levinson - Cats and Painting

Monkey under the easel.

Rebecca has had a lot of recurring themes in her paintings - mermaids, fairies, angels, birdies. She has been drawn as much to their imagery as she has their abstract shapes - the ways the lines of their bodies can fill a canvas and carry patterns and colour. One of her earliest recurring creatures are cats, and it's clear why in this second sense, with the way those long legs and tails can snake around or playfully reach out. But they've also been so ubiquitous because cats have always had such a huge presence in our lives.

If you ever visited our Fremantle home you might have seen as many as a dozen cats - many rescued, some just showing up because they knew that McLaren street was the place to be. Cats and painting always intertwined, with cats circling through Rebecca's legs as she painted and cat hairs having to be picked off from drying canvases.

Manu making his mark.

Rebecca and Ross do not have the empire of cats they once did - living on a much larger property they have many other animals, but there is Monkey, an old-lady cat, who has recently started to take naps below Rebecca's easel. Decades on and in new homes they are still making their presence known and felt.

Monkey in the sun.

Recently when my mum went to visit me in Melbourne she got to meet Mrs. Levinson, my landlord's cat. I don't own any pets right now, but with my history with cats I consider myself a friend to all of them - and Mrs. Levinson is canny enough to take advantage of this and stand outside my door and scream at me for food, or else sneak in through a window and surprise me while I'm at my computer. But I'm a big fan of cats if not only for their disagreeable behaviour - the more demanding and selfish the more I enjoy them. After she flew back to Margaret River Rebecca sent me a few photos of the paintings from this collection and told me that Mrs. Levinson seemed to appear in at least a few of them. If nothing else, they've been helping my mum paint for decades.

Mrs. Levinson screaming at me.

Shop the Monkey & Levinson paintings here.