This is my cat Bebe (pronounced Bay-bay). Her portrait was painted with acrylic paints on an 11×14 inch canvas and completed September 25, 2025. Over my entire life I have had a total of ten cats, including the two that still are with me. I am gradually taking the time to do all of their portraits, in between working on commissions and other personal projects. It has been difficult for me to do this for a number of reasons. One is the obvious lack of time, since I am usually kept busy with other people’s portraits. The second is I did not feel my skill level was good enough to attempt them (my skill with acrylic paint; I am very proficient with pastels but I want to paint these so I can hang them on my wall without the need for frames). The third, and most daunting reason, is the emotional difficulty. It is hard to paint your own pet once they have passed, and I regret putting it off for so long. I had meant to paint Bebe’s portrait while she was still alive, but got sidetracked with other projects, then it was too late. Now I only have photographs of her.

Bebe was a special cat. I adopted her from the animal hospital where I worked in October 2003. A client had found her in their yard, an one day old kitten with no mother and no siblings. Her eyes were not open and she still had her umbilical cord attached to her belly. I offered to foster her, and for the next six weeks, I got up every 3-4 hours to bottle feed her. By the time she was old enough to adopt out, I decided to keep her; a foster failure. She had already bonded with my five other cats at the time, and since she was alone, it was that much harder to give her up. So I kept her, and named her Bebe. Her name is the Spanish word for baby, and is pronounced like ‘Bay-Bay’. One of her favorite things to do was play fetch with her toy mice. I would throw them down the hallway and she would chase them, pick them up in her mouth, and bring them back to me, dropping them at my feet for me to continue the game. She had very thick dense black fur, with a tiny white spot on her chest. As she got older, her fur began to get a salt and pepper appearance, and her muzzle and paws turned completely white, giving her the appearance that she stepped in flour or corn starch. She lived to be 18 years old, which, while it is a good long life, it still never seems long enough.

For her portrait I chose realism with natural colors. Although she is black, she has a lot of white hairs, and the black fur is very shiny and reflective. So I used a lot of grey tones in her fur for the highlights on her shiny black fur. Her eyes were a bright yellow with a hint of amber, and she always had a perpetual grouchy face with her heavy brow and downturned eyes. In the reference photo i chose, she was lying on a white fleece blanket, and the background of the photo was black because she was on my black leather computer desk chair, so I kept that as the background. Black animals with a dark background can be striking, especially when the edges of their fur and ears catches the light, making a little outline. I chose to paint her entire body rather than just her face because I wanted to paint her little white toes.

She is probably the only one of my own cats I will be able to paint this year. I hope to do another one next year. I also had a veiled chameleon named Curly that I will eventually paint.