Philip Absolon

"I do lots of drawing from life. I’ve drawn continuously since I was sixteen. I like to watch cats moving and draw them. Then I enlarge the drawing on a photocopier and trace it onto the canvas using dressmaker’s tracing paper. I usually paint 8-10pm every night: a painting takes up to a month."

Paintings, poems and more

On YouTube

Absolon works in his bedsit in Rochester, where he presumably keeps the cats he regularly chooses to paint. He seems proud to have been rejected by the RCA when he showed them a selection of these in 1987. Some of the cat paintings are classics, but for me the most interesting works are those that depict people and unusual places, such as The Meaning of Life, which shows representatives from a variety of faith groups having a meeting in front of a mystical, psychedelic building…