Leap Then Look

Caught mid-leap, the cat appears suspended between movement and stillness. Leap Then Look explores the instinctive energy and alertness that characterise the animal’s physical presence. Painted directly onto a Victorian pine panel, Lawrence’s brisk, scraped and brushed marks retain the immediacy of the gesture, allowing the cat to emerge through traces of movement rather than fixed detail. The elongated panel echoes the cat’s vertical, airborne form, while the worn surface connects the fleeting moment to the domestic spaces cats inhabit.

Oil paint on Victorian pine panel .

Dimensions: 24 x 49.5 cm.

Vanessa Lawrence’s Cats series explores the energy, presence and instinctive physicality of cats she has known, observed and lived alongside. Drawing on observation and memory, the paintings capture the charged physical language of an animal always alert to its surroundings. Lawrence’s wider practice is rooted in drawing from performance. Here, that attention to movement turns to the domestic world of the cat. Painted in oil directly onto Victorian pine door panels, the works evoke the homes and thresholds cats inhabit. Brushed, scraped and scratched in a single session, the surfaces retain the immediacy and vitality of the encounter, creating traces of movement, presence and memory. Lawrence is a postgraduate alumna of the University of Brighton and the Royal Drawing School, London. Her work is held in private and public collections, including Glyndebourne Opera House, Sussex.