Cats At Home

Artworks and story by Donald Sylvester

Donald Sylvester has painted watercolor paintings for over 40 years and has always seen the theme of his artwork change, much like those events that changed his life.

He grew up in Indiana on a farm in the country near his grandmother. Being a teacher, she noticed he like to draw and assigned him things in her house to sketch. He later began drawing multiple pencil drawings of neighbors' barns and houses throughout the local area.

Moving to Houston in 1990, he went on to paint Mexican churches found on restaurant menus or flowering plantain stalks growing in neighbors' yards. Various animals and birds are featured in some of his creations such as his painting "Blue Swans" from his trips he took to the Galveston, Texas beach. He began also of course, painting cowboys, herds of cattle, Texas ranches and other western themes.

He began painting famous streets in Europe (Paris, London, Amsterdam) after traveling there in the 1990s. He drove a car from Amsterdam to Berlin (six months after the wall came down). He created many pen and ink drawings from that trip. Later, he would go on to add more street scenes after he visited South America from where he adopted his beautiful daughter.

With over 15,000 restaurants in Houston, Sylvester noticed interesting people in the business trying to make a living. He began painting many waiters and restaurant workers for several years.

When his daughter, Aura, moved to New Orleans to work and play music, she made him notice the architecture there and asked that he paint famous churches and local houses well known in that city. She was the one who told him to add cats to the pictures for interest. Most of Sylvester's watercolor pictures are generally painted with no more than two or three colors. Sylvester likes keeping pictures simple and feels the key behind the picture is the ability to draw, thus the hundreds of pencil drawings he did long before trying to paint. Donald Sylvester lives and continues to paint in Houston, Texas.

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