Stray kitties at the Sugar Cookie
Mersh and several of the dancers from the Sugar Cookie crouched on the floor around a stray ginger cat, coaxing it toward a shallow dish of milk. Mersh is at the centre in a coral shirt with his dark glasses on and a cigarette in his mouth; the women are in their stage hair and little else; the cat comes in from the right with its tail up.
Everything banks along a diagonal running up to the left, the figures crowded into the lower two thirds and the cat set alone against open wash at the right. The gap between the outstretched hand and the cat is the widest empty space on the sheet and it carries the whole subject.
Olive and ochre through the figures with one coral note in Mersh's shirt, against a cold slate and lavender ground. The cat is the only warm orange on the right-hand side.
Brush contour in black ink laid down fast, with the colour flooded in afterwards and left to pool and granulate. The background is one wet field flicked with darker spatter while still damp, and the paper around the cat is left bare.
Watercolour over ink in a spiral-bound sketchbook. Photographed as an open page at an angle, the binding cut by the upper left corner.
No signature within the drawn area.
Stray kitties