Bonsai Kitties

My Personal Attempts At A Fine Art

I found Bonsai Kitty to be a truly amazing site. The ideas this site suggested were really amazing to me; I had never considered cats as an art form before. I would like to share with you all three examples I'm quite proud of.

Informal Upright

One of my favorite kinds of bonsai is the informal upright, a tree which looks very similar to a "natural" tree, without the twisted and constrained forms that are sometimes used. I attempted this, with excellent results. Maya is about three years old, and at this point, we don't need to keep her wrapped in copper wire to maintain an excellent and expressive form.

That's about two and a half feet long, and she's only about an 8-pound cat. She is a graceful fixture, and I don't know what we would keep on that shelf if we didn't have her.

Elegant Imbalance

Many bonsai cats (and trees, as well) are unfortunately too regular; they fill the space allotted to them so perfectly that some elegance is lost. Without asymmetry, you cannot have true beauty. This one has been carefully kept on one side of the sink we grew him in, with only the tail crossing to the other side, representing the forces of nature. Graystoke is a wonderful and affectionate cat, and we never need to water him!

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Kitty Bookends

I always thought carved marble kitty bookends were cute, but lacked some of the warm, fuzzy quality that makes a cat such a great pet. This took a long time, let me tell you, but the posture is wonderful, and with his claws out, he can stick on the shelf wherever you need him, if you don't have a full shelf's worth of books.

Failures

Of course, not all my experiments worked... here's a few pictures to show what can go wrong with Kitty Bonsai.