Lanouette Kats and Kids Series
Begin Tour The Kats & Kids Gallery is a self running presentation. A new print will appear each 12 seconds. To pause the presentation, click the picture and view a larger version of the print.		The first Kats and Kids was in response to a gift. The autumn before my son Pete was born, his mother Penny was given a wicker rocking chair by the women she worked with at a baby shower. I wanted to thank them all. I had majored in printmaking in art school at Silvermine. Though I hadn’t worked in it at all after I started painting again, it seemed like the perfect way to thank a dozen people. The linoleum plate I crafted from a left over piece of kitchen flooring, very hard, glued to a piece of plywood. It was what I had on hand. The dense lino plate responded only to a hard steel engraving tool. It was a small Artist’s Proof edition. The second year brought another A/P edition. Remembering the limitations of that hard linoleum, I switched to wood, which over the years began to bend, so I glued it to a piece of plywood. In 1980, I missed a year because I was raising Pete. The outcry from friends at Christmas was audible, so I decided it needed to be a yearly event, and with a couple of exceptions, I have stuck to this promise to myself. I began buying lino plates at the art supply store. Again, I glued the plates to plywood which makes a permanent printing surface. As Pete grew, the focus of the chair shifted according to what he happened to be doing. In 1986 and 1987, he was outside playing; numbers V and VI reflect that. 1989 was my toughest year. Pete was in Arizona. I missed him terribly, and the image that emerged stares at that separation. This number VIII strikes me as the saddest of all the prints. The leaping cat that misses Pete is the sole dynamic of the entire image. In 1990, Pete was back all summer. We were reading and sharing Dragon Farmer stories, and the joy of that is evident. The chair is back, a notion of stability, with the White Rabbit looking on smoking his pipe. The three-legged cat was Pyewacket, inspirational to all, who lost a leg in a car accident. Once he healed, he showed more guts and determination than all of us. The years rolled on, and events and lives and changes were recorded each Christmas. Joy and stability returned to the series as our life here accommodated the vicissitudes of living, and we stretched to embrace it all. In 1999, Pete and Lorien were here for two glorious weeks around Thanksgiving . It inspired me to burn the chair on the beach. It was a new day and a new way. The chair is still fine. It’s in the studio. The series, since 1978, has taken on a life of its own. Over the years, I’ve often felt I wasn’t up to creating a single image that could convey all that I was feeling about the Kats and Kids, but it occurred. The beauty of creativity is that it takes you beyond your limitations. Over the years, these images have emerged through every conceivable process. Sometimes little doodles on a glimpsed vision that accumulates over weeks. Other times, a clear vision that comes to me and is chased down in sketches and changes as it moves through time. A few of the prints were dreams that came to me in the middle of the night - in the middle of wondering what I was going to come up with. Sumi has emerged as the most fluid and direct medium to work through the images I want to jam into these prints and the way they can all harmonize. In 1998 (number XVII), people we love kept showing up while I was working drawings. Pete, Luke, me and Jill on the left; Shirley, Rick, and a painted angel on the right; Crow T. Robot the cat in the middle. It seemed too crowded to me, but I had to go with it. Sit and stare at a blank piece of paper and imagine images, not words. Do that for 48 years and you’ll understand where these pictures, all of them, come from. Lay on your back and stare at the sky. Smell lilacs and see that aroma. It’s easy. Peter F. Lanouette