Nicolas Cage Loves His Cat. The Web Was Made for This Second

Nicolas Cage has a cat. Cage and that cat have impressed an artwork exhibit. The web has by no means had a greater day.  

The artwork will likely be displayed at CatCon, a conference wholly dedicated to the creature Al Gore had in thoughts when he invented our beloved worldwide community of linked computer systems. This yr’s occasion, which is sort of a Comedian-Con for cat folks, takes place from Oct. 1-2 in Pasadena, California.   

“Nicolas Cage is an artist’s dream topic — he is cult, he is camp and he DGAF,” stated CatCon founder Susan Michals, who’s additionally  founder and curator of Cat Artwork Present, a biennial exhibit of feline-focused creations that is sponsoring the Cage exhibit. “Cats have most of the identical traits, so why not mix the 2 and have a good time it on canvas?”

Seven artists are bringing their brushstrokes and pixels to CatCon for Uncaged: The Insufferable Weight of Genius Cat Artwork. 

The celebration of the versatile actor and his adopted black kitty Merlin contains Brian Hoffman‘s Catstor Troy, an 11 inch by 14 inch print, hand-embellished with diamond mud, embossed, signed and framed in an ornamental classic body. The piece — an homage to Cage’s wild-eyed villain in 1997’s Face/Off — reveals the actor’s head atop a retro cartoon woman’s physique, a bit of blue bow in his hair. He is surrounded by three cartoonish cats. 

“It is undoubtedly unusual and a tad creepy, however heartwarming and enjoyable in the event you love Cage and cats,” says the Boston designer, illustrator and printmaker. “Initially, the piece had Cage sitting subsequent to magic mushrooms in an homage to Alice in Wonderland and her cat Dinah, in addition to that one time Nic Cage allegedly took mushrooms together with his cat.” 

Vanessa Stockard‘s oil-on-board, titled Wild at Artwork, depicts the actor being embraced by a life-size black cat with yellow eyes and an identical yellow wig. I requested Jet, my very own black cat with yellow eyes, to critique the piece. 

“I discover the disjunction of cat and human in Stockard’s work each reductive and resonant,” Jet stated. “Anybody seen a hen I can kill?”

Cage’s pliably expressive face makes him a pure star of each work and quite a few memes. 

You have most likely seen GIFs of him from the 1997 action-thriller movie Con Air, his lengthy hair blowing within the wind, his eyes half-closed, a blissful smile on his sun-kissed face as he walks towards freedom after an extended jail sentence. You may need additionally seen the meme of his face superimposed onto numerous photographs of cats. Appropriately, Cage is a lifelong cat lover who calls Merlin his greatest pal. “He loves contact,” Cage says on this interview. “Generally he’ll leap into mattress and he’ll hug me, you understand? I will truly suppose it is my spouse.” 

The artwork in Uncaged will likely be on sale each in individual at Cat Con and on-line through Cat Artwork Present. Ten p.c of proceeds will profit three cat-related charities, with this new Cage-cat style hopefully benefitting all of meme-kind.