Hanami — Flower-Pattern Cartoon Cat, Garden Piece, Kanazawa

There is a particular kind of commission where the pattern matters more than the animal. This was one. The cat was almost a pretext.

The brief

A bobtail cat, standing, about 2 m, covered in flowers. The flower pattern came from a family textile — the client’s mother’s design, printed on fabric for most of a working life. The client wanted it on something that would not wear out.

Everything else was left to us. That is usually a warning sign. Here it was genuinely open, because the pattern was already the point.

Making a cat that can carry a pattern

A busy pattern needs a calm form, or the two fight each other. We reduced the cat to four large volumes — head, body, and two haunches — so that there would be broad surfaces for flowers to sit on. The muzzle, which would normally carry the character, was simplified to almost nothing. In exchange we allowed one big obvious smile, because a garden piece should acknowledge the viewer.

The colour of each daisy was pitched to the flowers visible through the garden window in April: white, soft pink, a yellow that is closer to pollen than to lemon, and a blue that is really a violet.

Build

Fibreglass over a steel core, gloss finish so that the piece catches the garden’s moving light and does not go flat under the overcast skies that Kanazawa gets for weeks at a time. The flowers were hand-laid over a bright ground and then clear-coated twice; roughly two hundred and fifty of them, in five sizes. We reserved the largest flowers for the flattest parts of the form.

In the garden

It stands where the path turns, so that it is seen against the pond and then against the pine. The client has said that visitors recognise the pattern before they recognise the cat, which she considers the correct order.