Sphynx Cat

Watercolor on Coldpress

I took a reference photo of this Sphynx cat at an indoor cat show. I stress that it was an indoor show because exposing a hairless cat to our harsh New England weather would be nothing less than cruel. I loved the coloration of this cat with her owl-like green eyes, white ears and bluish, lilac, greyish downy face .

After reading The Witches of Worm, I wanted to portray a more positive interpretation of Sphynx cats. I unearthed my photo of the Sphynx and decided I’d paint Worm in a way that showed all cats are beautiful, even the ones that are different. A couple of weeks into the painting, I read somewhere that Sphynx breed was developed in the mid-1970s. I knew that The Witches of Worm was published in the early 1970s. I skimmed through my copy of the book, and found what I was looking for near the end of the book. Worm wasn’t a Sphynx at all: he was an Abyssinian. The only explanation I can think of is that the cover of the book when it first came out had a Sphynxish cat face illustration. Ooops!

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