"I Paint the Way I Laugh"

As a cat lover, I like paintings or drawings about cats. One painting about cats I love is this one by Dutch painter Jan Nieuwenhuys.


Nieuwenhuys is one of the artists of the CoBrA Movement in the 1940s and 50s. The name CoBrA is derived from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, the cities from which the artists who founded the group came from. CoBrA artists painted directly and spontaneously. They used their fantasy and lots of colours. The subject matters of their paintings included animals or fantasy animals, mythology, folklore, primitive art, children’s drawings, etc. Such features can be seen in Nieuwenhuys’s “Cats” as well as this quotation of his: “I start with my material and my color. With that I express myself. From the material I come to my subject and that is maybe contrary to what painters did in earlier days. I paint the way I write, the way I laugh. That’s why I paint differently all the time, because my moods change. That’s the way I feel.”