I am very fond of animals.
After my first 2 cats (my beloved Pusspuss and Abbycat) passed on from old age, I felt too sad to have cats and decided to adopt a pair of cockatiels. They were bred to be hand tame, and would sit on my shoulder and nibble my hair and necklace. I started a fun habit of collecting edible weeds and grasses for them to eat, and soon got very familiar with which weeds were high in protein and safe to eat around our neighbourhood. At several occasions, I even tried a few of these weeds in a salad for myself. I’m pretty comfortable now with identifying wild plants such as sorrel, dandelion, cow thistle, pui grass, shepherd’s purse, chickweed, purslane, clover and several others. I also discovered the terrible sting of nettles, and even braved making nettle pesto for pasta - surprisingly delicious! Finding edible grasses and browse for my pets motivated me to take walks around my neighbourhood everyday.
Work and other life activities started to pick up momentum and I soon realised that I didn’t have enough time to devote to my little birds. I made the difficult decision then to give them away to another bird lover who would have time to interact with them. Eventually I found someone with a large aviary to adopt them, and my whistling pretty cockatiels went to their new home.
I wanted to experiment with a bright yellow background, and played around with paint spatters and drips for my backdrop tree (a jacaranda tree??). I had to do this at the back patio and consequently some of the floor tiles there are now polka dotted with purple and blue blobs. Ah well. Better than spattering my white indoor walls anyway.
So I painted this piece in memory of my 2 cockatiels, with a small feature of my current rag doll cat, Maxi, in the same painting. For a while, they co-existed in the same house, and I was always amused at how he would eye them off.