Not Everyone Sees the Same Cat

Stories Around a Painting

This painting is currently hanging at Third Culture Coffee in Bellevue.

Over the next weeks, while people can still physically encounter it there, I invited a few writers to spend some time with the image and respond to it through short fiction, essays, and perhaps even poetry.

I have always been fascinated by how different people can see entirely different things in the same story. Perhaps this is simply the reverse experiment: how a single image can contain several emotional realities at once. Some people see the woman first. Others notice the cat. Someone else stays with the red moon, or the lamp, or the silence between the two figures. One person sees solitude. Another sees danger. Another sees tenderness. Memory. Superstition. Waiting. Childhood. Disappearance. Or simply a woman standing under a red moon holding a black cat, without needing the image to become anything more than that.

The stories will appear progressively here during the exhibition.

I do not know yet exactly what this will become. Maybe a small literary experiment. Maybe only a temporary conversation around a painting. But part of the point is to let it evolve before deciding what it is.

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