Each year the Chelsea Arts Club asks its artist members to produce a small work, which will be auctioned for the benefit of The Chelsea Arts Club Charity and the Artists General Benevolent Institution.

Last year the theme was ‘Heroes and Villains, but with the stipulation that they would prefer not to see too many Marilyn Munroes, or Hitlers, too many Super Heroes and especially fluffy kittens. I just couldn’t resist the challenge – or maybe I was reverting to childhood as I made a print based on kittens and called it The Usual Suspects.. 

However a year later I started to rework the idea with the added ambiguity that although mice are frightened of cats, in the world of the cartoon the mice invariably come out on top and intimidate their feline antagonists. The images are interwoven with a text that contains an A to Z of the names of famous cats from literature, history and the cinema.

A number of people who liked the cat print asked me to make a similar piece only this time using Dogs and cartoon cats as the source material.  In this case I used various cartoon cats and as with the previous print underpinned the images with a text that was based on an A-Z of famous dogs from literature, history and the cinema.

Fear of Cats, and Fear of Dogs are two limited editions each comprising 5 signed and numbered prints on canvass, printed with Epson archival inks and with additional hand-applied glazes. It is a first generation original print, which only exists in this form.