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"When you realize how perfect everything is,
you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky"
- Gautama Siddharta.

This is the premise of "Cloud 9" a Catmasutra painting done in the 2006 exhibition. As this catmasutra cat knows, the purpose of life is to climb the sky and find a great big Cumulus cloud to sleep in. So use this wallpaper as a reminder to put a smile on your face, and if you don't feel like it , just visualize floating and lying on one of those fluffy incarnations in the sky wahahaha!

"We had the sky up there,
and we used to lay on our backs
and look up at them,
and discuss whether
they was made or just happened"
- Mark Twain

Well, that to a degree, reflects my fascination with the sky. And strangely enough, it is the cat that taught me how to appreciate the sky. Remembering as a child in the yard of my grandma's house, lying on the bleached dry cemented floor, watching the wet clothes swaying, half revealing and half waving the clouds goodbye, like a peek-a-boo of sorts. It all started with a promise made with the cat, that when we meet here in the yard, we would just stretch out and do nothing; we would watch the sky, enjoy the moment till one of us decides to call it a day. I kept wondering how wide the sky is as you can see it curve away down below you and beyond. And you wonder if it is the same sky on the other side.

"In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west;
people create distinctions out of their own minds
and then believe them to be true." - - Gautama Siddharta.

;)

Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol produced in 1962, consists of thirty-two canvases, each one consisting of a painting of the various canned soup flavors that the company offered at the time.

The Campbell soup is instantly recognizable both as an ordinary can of soup and also, amazingly as an icon for a major art movement - pop art! In the sixties, processed food signified American affluence and struck a chord with those who lived through the Depression. Herein lies the process for pop art and I always find this art movement intriguing. "The things represented within the paintings were available to people of most classes, while the paintings themselves, which proved to be highly marketable as art commodities, were likewise available, especially when reproduced as prints, posters, and postcards." (David MaCarthy, Pop Art, 2003).

Visit www.catmasutra.com for more catty tales of Angel and Halo.

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Came across this quote by Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkeggard, and it captured me for a while, stopped the tracks of the present from becoming the future, so to speak. Started searching the phrase and I ended up with a number of quotes regarding time and the future. Ever wondered what'll happen if you receive a notice that says: "Tomorrow has been cancelled. The day after tomorrow has been postponed and will now occur on the following day." And suddenly you have an extended Present that refuses to flow into Tomorrow (Think Groundhog day) and if we live without expectations, then there's no future, only an endless present (François Jacob).

"Although the future will never happen, it is already here: no matter how fast you run after it, the future will run just as fast. It is always around the next corner. If you pause to catch your breath, the future will pause too, waiting for you, just around the corner, out of sight. But how can it know you so well, when you don't know it? "

Or according to The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, the Future is defined as "that period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness assured." Or as a riddle by Joseph Cornish, what does not exist and never has existed, yet is our most precious possession, because it is all we have left?

Perhaps a quote by the Mexican Poet, Octavio Paz is apt at this time, "The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, 'Not Yet,' and thus denies us... Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present."

Apple on the Inside is from the second Catmasutra painting exhibition and where time collapses into a single point of inactivity, caught "in-between" time- it's right there, just an apple on the inside...

Here pop artists are using the popularity of marketplace objects to help sell their own work - ingenious! In other words, it's allowing customers to buy and engage with their own tastes sanctified by the aura of fine art. In Catmasutra II , it dawned upon me to take those masterpieces that I love from great artists such as Seurat, Van Gogh, Monet, Magritte, Hockney and of course Warhol (which are available in prints of course) and immerse the Catmasutra cat as part of the landscape and viola, the birth of the Catmasutra Campbell Soup Series. The first was "Fish Soup" done in 2005 and "Hot Soup" in 2006 for Catmasutra 3.

I'm like searching for something... A knot of air, solidified into something heavy (maybe lead) that lay immovable at the bottom. It probably will take some time before the knot unties itself and becomes air again so that I can breathe it out. Right now, it's catzophrenic split personality - a tale of 2 halves taped together with a Catmasutra Balm pain patch.

Catzophrenia (1997). Inspired by the classic 50's badass biker's tattoo, it blares violently with the horsepower of 512 light bulbs. Catmasutra adds brakes to the same imagery, and is akin to a night shelter after speeding for hours on a highway. Rather than ending in a fireworks of explosion, it stops for a little respite, refueling the passion to find that something in between the two halves, and accepting the abyss that sometimes comes with it.

Two more of my favorite pieces were sold - "Drunk.Punch.Love" and today, "Dancers" which I was just musing over yesterday! Drunk.Punch.Love, the title was based on the movie "Punch-Drunk Love" starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson. It won the Best Director prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, and is about "...this misfit love story of disconnected people trying to find one another in an antagonistic world... a comedy of discomfort and rage that turns unexpectedly sweet and pure". It was a departure from the kind of movie that Sandler normally does, and I really liked the film when I saw it. It has an "Art Film" feel and pacing to it, and it leaves you with a "pleasing, unplaceable sensation...". This is the same with this Catmasutra piece, full of contradictions, both sweet and bitter, both happy and sad, but intrinsically, it's about the certain sweetness on the surface, and in this case, a kind of candy coating that lets us roll with life's punches, that allows us to swallow the bitter pills a little bit more easily. The concept of the painting was inspired by Damien Hurst "Untitled" piece done in 1996 using gloss household paint and butterflies on canvas. The fate of the beautiful butterflies caught in candy juxtapose the bittersweet condition of life; We need to know one in order to know the other....