Cats have long been a settled presence in human culture. They turn up in the lines of poets, in the reflections of philosophers, in the offhand jokes of writers who could never have imagined that a passing remark about their own cat would be remembered. 365 giorni con i gatti (365 Days with Cats) gathers that discreet presence and returns it in the form of a perpetual calendar: one page for every day of the year.
A small daily ritual
Every page offers a quotation set alongside an illustration. Behind it lies a considerable amount of research: Carolina Zanotti tracked down and selected the quotations one by one, moving easily between cultures and registers, proverbs, Japanese haiku, aphorisms by writers and poets from all over the world. The result is a mosaic of voices on the cat, able to shift between the learned and the popular within a few pages.
It is a wonderfully colourful book, illustrated by Eunjoo Lee, a delightful discovery for us. We sat down for a chat with her.
The cats of Eunjoo Lee
A Korean artist originally from Seoul, Lee studied at Hongik University and went on to specialise in illustration at the Glasgow School of Art. She came to the profession after a spell as a designer at an advertising agency: steady work, but not enough to make her give up the idea of becoming an illustrator. “Eventually, I decided to study illustration in Glasgow, and I took the leap.” During her studies she sent out hundreds of emails to publishers and clients, until one of them replied and gave her her first professional commission. She has since worked with Starbucks, Liberty London and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in 2016 her project Utopia won the AOI World Illustration Awards in the New Talent category.
We asked her where her creative process begins these days.
I used to sketch by hand quite often, and I still enjoy doing it. However, when I’m working on multiple projects at the same time, I usually don’t have the luxury of time, so I start creating concepts digitally right away. For client projects, I try to provide as many concept options as possible so they have different directions to choose from. Book projects are a little different. Since they usually involve creating a large number of illustrations, it’s often not practical to develop many different concepts for each image. In those cases, I focus on maintaining a consistent visual style and working efficiently throughout the project.
A year of cats, one quotation a day: what convinced her to say yes to a book devoted to them?
Many of my friends are cat owners, so I immediately thought of their cats. They all have such different personalities and unique charms. I also felt that cats are such a fascinating subject. They are expressive, playful, mysterious, and full of character. I was confident that illustrating a book about cats would be a lot of fun, so saying yes to the project felt like a natural decision.
As for the illustrations, do they come out of reading the quotations, or do they follow a visual thread of their own?
Nuinui gave me a great deal of creative freedom and respected my artistic approach throughout the project, which I really appreciated. At the same time, I always tried to make sure that my illustrations reflected the mood and meaning of each quote. Even with the freedom to develop my own visual ideas, it was important to me that the images and the text felt connected and told the same story.
The result is a set of stylised, almost ideogrammatic cats, built from a few strokes and blocks of solid colour, yet remarkably expressive: the grumpy grey one in front of the fire, the pair on the roof in a palette of pink and lilac, the red-and-white one dozing under a full moon. Asked which artists have shaped the way she draws, Lee names Picasso: what she admires most is his drawing, the ability to produce free, expressive lines within the space of a simple sheet of paper. And in a sense, that is exactly what her cats do.
Finally, we asked whether this work had left her with a cat story to tell.
One of the things I enjoyed most while working on the book was discovering how many cat-related sayings and stories exist around the world. It made me realise that cats have been loved by people across different cultures for a very long time. I also had a lot of fun illustrating scenes inspired by different places and backgrounds from around the world. Through the project, I was able to imagine not only the cats themselves, but also the many different ways people live alongside them, and that was one of the most enjoyable parts of the experience.
The cats of NuiNui
365 giorni con i gatti is published by NuiNui, a publishing house founded in Vercelli, which brought out its first illustrated books in October 2014. The NuiNui catalogue holds more than one volume devoted to cats, and in a couple of cases these are first Italian translations: Divini felini. Il gatto nell’arte giapponese, in which Rhiannon Paget, curator of Asian art at the Ringling Museum in Florida, gathers two hundred works from over thirty collections, among them prints, paintings, screens and figurines; and Divinità feline. Dei, dee e demoni by Natalie Bovis, illustrated by Lucy Rose, which surveys fifty-one feline deities and spirits from four continents. We’ll be coming back to them soon.