It’s said, Franz Marc, the pioneer-expressionist painter, attempted to “animalize” art by giving it Nature’s throb, a vitality (he painted deer in the forest, a series, but he never realized his potential for he died in The First World War).

Then there’s the mystic painter, Morris Graves, with his Zen gnosis for a time tackled nothing but…Birds! With sure, delicate touches successfully delineated for the eye to behold their innate spirituality and equanimity.

(Legend tells, God created the birds, beasts, flowers first before man; and the birds were the first to intone man’s speech.)

Now we have Antonio Chan, cat lover. In his own vision and sensitive style, he has married well the best of Chinese ideogram  art with the benign subtlety of the faceted forms of the best in Cubism and Expressionism. He excels in his canvasses of landscapes, still lifes, seascapes but it is his paintings of cats we are highlighting here.

He grew up in the company of cats (most kids would rather have dogs). He learned their manners, ways and means early; so did he learn too their character and characteristics, their moods.Because they were accessible as models, he began painting them, fascinated by their sinuosities and felineness.

No wonder he ventures “beyond the visible and the imagined.” His humanity he does not fail to infuse its freshness into his cat portraits.(No two cat portraits seem the same.)Bearing in mind that the Chinese masters of watercolor in a few saber thrusts of the ink brush can render a horse like no other you have seen. Chan himself wields the paint brush like a saber.

Like the painted horses of the Chinese masters, Chan can make manifest the animal energy, the sensuousness in the bosom of cats, aspects you do not generally notice in ordinary cats. They make you realize their unique existence in creation. They are more human now than the animals that they are.In themselves, cats evoke the imaginative spirituality they possess, show that embellishments of culture are non-essential, intellectual fantasy being rare in our present plastic arts, as they say, the interiorized obvious struggles against provincialism and philistinism. One stroke of his paint brush makes us aware and conscious of their presence.

Chan has freed style from its prison, he paints not according to any art doctrine or philosophy (like surrealism is philosophy); for he is compelled to create by his own inner vision of reality. To his own good, he learned well from the masters—Cezanne, Gaugin, Kokoschka, and Ma Yuan. Even from African art, its rhythm that beats like new, fresh blood in the artist’s veins, teaching him what’s artistic, what’s bogus.

The cat is Oriental, long its history. It is the most psychic of animals, the best helper of witches in their witchcraft. To be called a woman with cat’s eyes is great flattery. Chan’s cats have a devilish twinkle in their eye, nay mischievous. Touch them and they will spring to life.

Chan makes the impalpable palpable.The air of seriousness pervades, even though the slight satirical smiles of the cats intrude in your appreciation of them. His creative works are his pleasures in life, and they have no limits. Now the feeling prevails that art, said by another, is something to experience directly, for excitement and satisfaction, rather than to evaluate in terms of the latest verbal label and fashion. This intrudes in the mind when looking at Chan’s pictures. The old saw holds: the critic cannot create the idiom of paintings, he can only translate it.

There is more humanity, humanness, humaneness in cats than in most human beings.