Nicolas Cage Loves His Cat. The Internet Was Made for This Moment

Nicolas Cage has a cat. Cage and that cat have motivated an art exhibit. The world-wide-web has never ever experienced a greater day. 

The artwork will be exhibited at CatCon, a convention wholly devoted to the creature Al Gore experienced in intellect when he invented our beloved all over the world community of connected computer systems. This year’s function, which is like a Comedian-Con for cat people today, normally takes position from Oct. 1-2 in Pasadena, California. 

“Nicolas Cage is an artist’s dream subject — he’s cult, he is camp and he DGAF,” said CatCon founder Susan Michals, who’s also founder and curator of Cat Art Show, a biennial exhibit of feline-targeted creations that is sponsoring the Cage exhibit. “Cats have quite a few of the identical characteristics, so why not blend the two and celebrate it on canvas?”

7 artists are bringing their brushstrokes and pixels to CatCon for Uncaged: The Unbearable Bodyweight of Genius Cat Artwork. 

The celebration of the multipurpose actor and his adopted black kitty Merlin features Brian Hoffman‘s Catstor Troy, an 11 inch by 14 inch print, hand-embellished with diamond dust, embossed, signed and framed in a decorative vintage body. The piece — an homage to Cage’s wild-eyed villain in 1997’s Confront/Off — displays the actor’s head atop a retro cartoon girl’s overall body, a small blue bow in his hair. He’s surrounded by a few cartoonish cats. 

“It is really undoubtedly unusual and a tad creepy, but heartwarming and exciting if you adore Cage and cats,” says the Boston designer, illustrator and printmaker. “To begin with, the piece had Cage sitting subsequent to magic mushrooms in an homage to Alice in Wonderland and her cat Dinah, as perfectly as that a person time Nic Cage allegedly took mushrooms with his cat.” 

Vanessa Stockard‘s oil-on-board, titled Wild at Art, depicts the actor staying embraced by a everyday living-dimensions black cat with yellow eyes and a matching yellow wig. I asked Jet, my individual black cat with yellow eyes, to critique the piece. 

“I find the disjunction of cat and human in Stockard’s get the job done both of those reductive and resonant,” Jet stated. “Any one witnessed a fowl I can destroy?”

Cage’s pliably expressive deal with helps make him a normal star of each paintings and a lot of memes. 

You’ve got in all probability noticed GIFs of him from the 1997 motion-thriller film Con Air, his very long hair blowing in the wind, his eyes 50 percent-closed, a blissful smile on his sun-kissed facial area as he walks towards freedom immediately after a lengthy jail sentence. You could have also seen the meme of his confront superimposed onto plenty of photographs of cats. Properly, Cage is a lifelong cat lover who phone calls Merlin his ideal pal. “He enjoys contact,” Cage says in this interview. “Sometimes he’ll jump into mattress and he’ll hug me, you know? I am going to truly consider it is my spouse.” 

The artwork in Uncaged will be on sale equally in human being at Cat Con and on-line by way of Cat Art Show. 10 p.c of proceeds will reward a few cat-linked charities, with this new Cage-cat style ideally benefitting all of meme-kind.