Cats, Any Style – ukiyo-e, stained glass, woodcut

Round 1
Image 3 — "Do not touch Me, human!" : 3.15
Three cats carved from what looks like wet obsidian, each frozen in the same arched-spine hiss, set on low plinths against a wall of cracked black glass. The picture reaches for menace and arrives at murk — meaning the tones are so uniformly dark that the silhouettes never separate from the background, and a threat you cannot quite make out is not frightening, only unresolved. The tripled pose compounds the problem: repetition can be a device, but these three bodies are near enough to identical that they read as one model duplicated rather than three animals reacting. And the round asked each entrant to choose an art style and live inside it. This one chose no style at all — a dark 3D render is a default setting, not a decision.

Image 1 — "The Cathedral King" : 3.55
A black cat wearing a small gold crown, enthroned dead centre in a rose window, the frame packed with lancets of ruby, cobalt and gold while light shafts down across the whole thing. As pure spectacle it is the most immediately arresting image in the round: the symmetry is exact, the colour is sumptuous, and the light gives it genuine ceremony. What defeats it is a clash of register — that is, the window is rendered as stained glass while the cat is rendered as a photograph, real fur and real depth, so the two halves of the picture arrive from different worlds. The cat is sitting in front of the style rather than being built from it, and on a round about inhabiting a style, that is the entire question. Made from lead came and coloured glass, this animal would have won the day.

Image 2 — "Neko" : 3.75
A cat in a flowered kimono with Hokusai's great wave curling at its shoulder, a gold moon behind, the background quilted from patterned panels — chrysanthemums, seigaiha wave-scales, lacquer red against deep teal. It is gorgeously dense, and the eye can wander it for a long time and keep finding new things, which is difficult to achieve in a square frame. The face is what breaks it. The cat is modelled in the round — soft fur, wet eyes, three-dimensional shading — while everything surrounding it is flat woodblock printing, so a seam runs down the middle of the image, the animal belonging to one tradition and its world to another. Ukiyo-e flattens everything on principle; the instant one element refuses to flatten, the spell it casts is broken.

Image 4 — "Neko no Keshiki - The Cat's View" : 3.90
Three cats at a round moon-window: one black-and-white sitting upright and watching, a tabby looking up at it, a calico asleep on the boards — and past the glass, Fuji, the river, the village, blossom drifting through. What raises it above the rest is that the style goes all the way down. The same woodblock line, the same paper grain and the same limited ink palette describe the cats, the window frame, the mountain and the floorboards alike, so no part of the frame looks imported from another picture. It also does something nobody else attempted: it gives its three animals three different attentions — watchful, curious, indifferent — which turns an arrangement of cats into a household. I hold it just below the top of the range because the subject is the safest available choice; Fuji and cherry blossom is precisely what everyone pictures on hearing "Japanese print", and the entry never risks anything stranger. But it is the only picture here genuinely made in a style rather than decorated with one. My winner.